Possible Fictions: Fragments from the Book of the Living
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
Waters I’m Swimming Today
feel free to join – the water’s fine!
Other Worlds / Our World … as conceived by a Semiotic Animal
The following is, again, a fairly dense essay, but I find the content so fascinating and very well presented. The concepts and observations herein form a central core of what I desire to use language to explore – signs upon signs within signs over signs – living in the specificity of our species – and attempting to discover what/where/how that specificity (namely language) might lead/take/auto-generate itself forward. If these sorts of things interest you as well, i encourage you to lend Deely’s writing your time.
(click here for essay) – Umwelt by John Deely
Plunder
Items arriving today:
and how I stay in school:
keeping on keeping on
“Write about what you want to know”
-Lance Olsen-
Straightforward: Words from the Book of the Living
Curtis White, in response to the question “What do you think is the hardest thing about being a creative in this culture?” (North America, 2012):
and to “What’s the best advice you might offer a beginning writer?” (I just ‘slipped’ and typed “writher”!), he replied:
“So my best advice is to read Nietzsche until you understand him and go from there”
thank you Curtis White 🙂
Congruency: Of Delight in It
Thank you Superstitious Naked Ape for such a spot-on condensed rendition of (I think) what Pelevin’s Helmet of Horror evoked for me as well! Really readers – check these out together – incredible lucky spontaneous occurrences of “synchronicity”? Almost?
by The Superstitious Naked Ape
with the personal caveat that it may as well be named “The Self Machine,” “The Reality Machine” and so forth…
Umwelt
“Language is a thing: it is a written thing, a bit of bark, a sliver of rock, a fragment of clay in which the reality of the earth continues to exist.”
Maurice Blanchot
Sentencing
“The truth is that large tracts of human speech are nothing but signs of direction in thought…”
William James
Identity & Flipping Numbers like Coins
What exactly is it about the arbitrary changing of numbers, parceling of time, divisions and subdivisions of existent moments, that prompts and wriggles us to consider change – feel obligated or massaged toward it – dream of it? I can say that in all my dizzying thoughts about it – how society and culture (Petrie-dish like) inundate and stimulate individuated personal alterations – I cannot figure out why crossword-puzzle-like taxonomies and designations of life-fragments labeled by stick-systems of reference, mathematical calculations and so forth stimulate (simulate?) desires, wishes, regrets, metamorphic movements in the human gang…
Be that as it may, today is the first day of the first month of the year containing 0-1-2-3 (my wife comments what a delightful play that must be for numerologists), and while my beloved is out signing up at the Y and beginning self-care with new devotion, I am denuding my desk, dusting and polishing its surface, taking revised stock of the pounds of books that weight its surface, reorganizing, selecting, making hard choices about what is necessary for me TODAY with some forward thinking. The numbers have changed. The game must be different, no?
In the process, I open a drawer I apparently haven’t for a very long time, coming across a miniature moleskine notebook, first entry dated January 2003! A decade ago, how interesting! I leaf through…and here are some of the things that capture my attention:
- a quote from my son Aidan (he would have been 5 at the time) on being unable to remember something: “it’s in my brain, I just can’t find the right aisle.”
- and Steinbeck: “its inhabitants, as the man once said, ‘whore, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said ‘saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.”
- Cixous: “it is this hunger for flesh and for tears, our appetite for living, that, at the tip of forsaken fingers, makes a pencil grow.”
- Handke: “in any case, I experienced moments of extreme speechlessness and needed to formulate them – the motive that has led men to write from time immemorial.”
- “Books should not flatter our sense of self. They should investigate it. I read another person in order to get better at interrogating my own unexamined narrative” – Richard Powers
The last entry reads like this…”We used to always pick models or icons we wanted to be like: have what they had, whole persona and possessions – WHO would I want to be? … When does it hit you that you only want to be you with some other life?”
Wonder where I was…a kind of number-flipping query…
further to go….2013
All my Words are Silent 