Two variations of older, longer works…trying to remember possibilities…
Words Gestures Order
Words & Gestures
Category: Traces
All the wow I come across in the world of languaging assembled – heroic efforts discovered as they come to be unconcealed for me
On Being Other
On Being Other
(after Heidegger, on Holderlin)
Broken off from origin: gods, family, homeland.
Early switched direction – turning back, against, since.
No belonging. No church, no community of mortals.
Reliant on the peaks and the abyssal.
No lasting love, but efforts toward convention –
when giving up –
even offspring, domesticity,
varietous employment,
almost friends.
No lasting commerce, always in-between,
feeling resistance and restraint,
constraints of discipline and need,
of longings, love, and lust.
Searching Other
fueled by others – across the times –
creators of the peaks and their abysses.
Oscillation.
Not yet rational, it commences –
undone in the unknowing, uncertain constant flow
generates turbulence toward an opening
or a gap, some kind of fold –
“run up hard against the unsayable.”
the closing line is a quotation from Heidegger’s
lectures on Holderlin’s poems “Germania” & “The Rhine”
Not-Belonging, Chapters
I feel somewhat apologetic, but here is one more selection from my archives. Another that when I re-read I am unable to see how I might do better, or how I ever got it done at all, yet all my work un-published or rejected, so I know it is not “good enough” per whatever the current cultural milieu would prefer. “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Perhaps. In any case, it circles around for me like the tail-eating snake I am, in hopes it might engender something new, no, in hopes it might be put to rest. For any who read it, I would be hard pressed to metaphor my astonishment, humility, gratitude and begging-of-patience, including a sheer and sharp ache of deep appreciation for your life’s time and likely unwarranted, gracious, attention.
Chapters That Don’t Belong
(please click image or title for text)
many thanks
Narrating Fragments
“And in life, meaning is not instantaneous. Meaning is discovered in what connects, and cannot exist without development. Without a story, without an unfolding, there is no meaning. Facts, information, do not in themselves constitute meaning. Facts can be fed into a computer and become factors in a calculation. No meaning, however, comes out of computers, for when we give meaning to an event, that meaning is a response, not only to the known, but also to the unknown: meaning and mystery are inseparable, and neither can exist without the passing of time. Certainty may be instantaneous; doubt requires duration: meaning is born of the two. An instant photographed can only acquire meaning insofar as the viewer can read into it a duration extending beyond itself. When we find a photograph meaningful, we are lending it a past and a future.”
-John Berger, Another Way of Telling –
Please Stand By…
…still working…
Locations in the Mapping of Meaning
In my efforts to ground and attend to my experience and express it with honesty (see Opening the Hand) I have developed a map of locations – realms of the process that have risen as prominent regions within the difficulty, effort, grief, growth and procession of engaging dramatic change… You can view it here: Locations on the Map of Meaning.
To view the text for each mode, simply hover over the nodes title, click or press the + button or the down arrows beneath each location title to see full content. Some nodes lead to further nodes or you can use the buttons along the bottom of the screen. Repeating my former disclaimer…
“All of this is to say that I plan a series of posts that will be intensely personal, self-revelant, my own way of reaching toward my experience, my being, and selecting language with which to mark it down – for re-memory, re-cognition, observation, reception, attention, account. These are journal entries, frankly. They are what I have to write. I am calling them “Mapping the Meaning.” Since I know very few of you personally, in your whole presence, I expect confession, inquiry, and its self-circular expression to genuinely interest or benefit very few of you. For me, it is writing with an open hand.”
Promise
“Life is not susceptible perhaps to the treatment we give it when we try to tell it.”
-Virginia Woolf-
+
2 Books that generate promise…
(click covers for summaries)
“For it is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject,
and all subjects are infinite.”
-Herman Melville-
To live, deeply
There was earth inside them, and
They dug.
– Paul Celan
“everything gives way, opens up, flows out, flows back, flecks…”
“I am in words, I am made of words, of the words of others, what others, this place too, the air too…”
As the semester’s projects begin to disintegrate into final clumps of submission…my innards yawn and stretch and struggle awake, expressing a yearning to search…spill forward instead of re-searching…explore and extend…
to construct and create without resources – to invent from the miscellaneous stockpiles of information and data accrued through intense weeks of devouring and ingesting…
This essay, from Maurice Blanchot, regarding Samuel Beckett – “Where Now? Who Now?” – captures that no-place of beginning – amid a chaos of signs and sensations – knowledge and ignorance – words and emotions concocted from immersion in information sources and recorded knowledge that constitutes “higher learning”…
please engage!
All my Words are Silent 