Imago – a theory

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figure - Holly Suzanne mixed media on canvas 2012

Imago

 

We all have it somewhere, a figure ill-informed and compositely made.

 

Mine begins like this: part-womb and part-breast, and hair of dark stars. There are wrinkles, faces mostly turned away or altogether absent, save on the specialist of days. It is not rounded. Mostly I study the back. I remain.

Fine-featured then, since I’m left to my own, hips holding rooms and breasts short by half. A particular’d elegance and a voice that soothes, all things I add to what’s missing.

I can smell her or him, scented of pollen and silt. I remain on the lookout, shaping the notes as lines on a canvas, rain over sky.

I believe it appears, here and there, a savior, a teacher, an object to adore. When faced with a mountain or storm I learn more. A natural wonder. There’s awe in the outline.

And passion. Words on a page, notes on a scale, a scintillant stirring.

It comes to light and it sings. In its movements, its promise, its sounds. I embrace and the figure is blurred. My dark shadow. It walks away, or I retreat and recoil.

It looks like this: fluid and sturdy, lithe and filled with quiet fuel. Eternal source (a womb, a breast) and distant constellation (object of desire) otherwise function of the Muse, symbol and seed woven together.

To follow after, and derive. Layered with impossible nourishment, what infinity breeds.

 

Goods for all

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Virginia Woolf:  “What is the phrase for the moon?  And the phrase for love?  By what name are we to call death?  I do not know.  I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up the scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz.  I need a howl; a cry.”

Jean-Luc Godard:  “Put another way, it seems to me that we have to rediscover everything about everything…There have been periods of organization and imitation and periods of rupture.  We are now in a period of rupture.  We must turn to life again.  We must move into life with a virgin eye.”

Carole Maso:  “Precious words, contoured by silence.  Informed by the pressure of the end.

Words are the lines vibrating in the forest or in the painting.  Pressures that enter us – bisect us, disorder us, unite us, free us, help us, hurt us, cause anxiety, pleasure, pain.

There is no substitute for the language I love.

I close my eyes and hear the intricate chamber music of the world.  An intimate, complicated, beautiful conversation in every language, in every tense, in every possible medium and form – incandescent.”

Jacques Derrida:  “Shall I just listen?  Or observe?  Both…reading proceeds in no other way.  It listens in watching.

Writing…coordinates the possibilities of seeing, touching, and moving.  And of hearing and understanding…Writing…gives itself over to anticipation…associated with the hands, not the eyes, it must recognize before it cognizes, apprehend leading toward comprehension”

 

and….no fears

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Joy : Learning

At a certain point one experiences knowledge acquisition (is it a “thing” to have, or an activity to do? or both?), learning, like expanding repertoire for a professional musician.

A day of research, study and reading feels like an increasing conversation for all the voices in one’s head.

It seems endless, for one thing, and like an ultimate “wonder of the world” – an intricate gargantuan and beautiful or awe-inspiring architecture – on another.

I attain these sorts of cumulative swells where each thing I ingest, no matter how remote in time, place, genre, subject, voice or style, seems to recall another voice, argument, demonstration, idea or style and synthetically weaves larger and larger universes of facts, names, concepts, rhythms and perspectives.

It is breathtaking and elating. As if boundaryless and eternal and full of an infinity of details, each their own delight. The impossibility of boredom, exhaustion, comprehension. For the insatiable, or those who go at eliminating the hole by trying to cut it out, the edges just grow wider, more enormous.

Which can also give one the sense of void and vortex. The spiraling braid of information and interpretation fraying abysmally in all directions. A sort of ennui of overwhelm. A stunned gluttony.

But, incapable of finishing prior to death and its elimination, the loom of mind keeps on whirring, constructing colors and patterns I’d never dreamed, yet, inevitably, others have, or did in the thinking, and it grows again.

The age-old cliché that the more you know the more you know that you do not know…absolutely and bewilderingly true. As you increase vocabularies of disciplines, the areas enabled just keep opening up or tangling in to new vistas. Talk about addictive and satisfaction in the endless pursuit! What an ecstatic paradox!

Your capacities, muscles for engaging, increase, and you just keep on exercising them on an inexhaustible supply – the compendium of human and world and all that is stitching them together!

Work it!!!

Writing(s)

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“Electronic writing will give us a deeper understanding of the instability of texts, of worlds.

Print writing will remind us of our love for the physical, for the sensual world.

Electronic writing shall inspire magic.  Print writing shall inspire magic.  Ways to heal.”

-Carole Maso, Break Every Rule-

Afterwords…more words : up with word(s)

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After Words…More Words

UP WITH WORD(S)

“and any art, after all the other things if may be about, is fundamentally about its medium”

-Ronald Sukenick-

In conclusion?

Perhaps this entire exercise, this simplistic simplification of what I think I might know about the medium of languaging (a mystery to me) has been undertaken and written for myself alone. Perhaps it is comprised of the sounds of sobbing in a dark little attic, me searching to find a “speech fellowship” in this world, in my life experience. I can guarantee to you that it is an experiment in assaulting frontiers, unknowns, and deep abiding fears of mine: that I don’t know what I’m doing, that my languagings aren’t effective, that I don’t relate/co-relate to others well, that my writings are woefully inadequate to experience and the world, that my life doesn’t mean anything, that I and my words don’t matter.

I have hopes beyond these things though.

My hopes, I believe, in part have been to raise or renew an awareness of the mysterious tangle of being languaging engages us in – our realities. And in part to encourage creativity in our usage of language(s), and an openness to its using us, in order for the medium itself to become, and for us to be aware of our languaging as an experiencing, itself. Not necessarily “about” experiences (though it often accomplishes this as well), nor inherently “about” anything “else” – but languaging as activity of being human.

That a compulsion to use language as art, is a movement toward relation and intimacy…to utilize what language(s) open to us, get funky with it (exercise agency), constructing new common places, possible fields, toward more completeness of overlapping or shared experiencing. That our use and experience of languaging is our shared experience – where we meet – without a necessity of sharing referrals or signifieds behind or beyond the words themselves. Meetings in/at/through the artifacts of languaging.

It is my opinion that this is what works of art have always done, regardless of medium, content or imagery: taken available matter, identifiable to us all and humanly acted in and with it, composing it in a manner that becomes its own unique place of experiencing and being.

This often requires undoing habitual ways of using the mediums of living in order that we perceive the human and the medium again, afresh, and are thereby enabled to engage all matters/persons participant directly as experiencing. This may help explain why art is often confounding or unsettling at first…becoming new and unique experiences…as we always fear the unknown swarm of reality until we risk our personalities against/toward/with it.

I want to encourage you, in both expression and encounter, to take more into account, to open against your fears, to begin to engage the materials of experience, the ubiquity of our borderlands, frames and “frontiers” with courage, existing at the thresholds that you always necessarily are, but not only craving the safety that comes from seeking what you know, are accustomed to, have familiarity or agreement with, nor for what it might “mean” or what might lie “behind” it or that it might be “about,” but learning and challenging yourself to meet it directly – to look at it, to relate openly and expectantly.

Moving you to construct in your own surrounds places unique to yourself and available to your world – welcoming or offering others opportunities and possibilities to join. To become.

To continually recommence and expand…our being.

Closure is misanthropic

-Lyn Hejinian-

 

instants of i…

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“i” for instance

(iota)

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQURSTUVWXYZ

And how was it I acquired this alphabet among so many others? Broken and crossed-out from the start, I adapted myself, twisted and stretched, contorted and shaped to become something more, something other than my single digit of a mark. Stumbling about all through the letters I reached, bowing this way and that, even circling round on myself exposing the emptiness inside, the only thing noteworthy surrounding me or attached to me from outside, where reality lies. Pleading and spreading my arms, split apart, right up to my crucified and zig-zagged zero-I-ng end.

 

fears…more fear…no fear(s)?

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My Fears: My Need

I DO. I UNDO. I REDO

“What deal must I strike in order to be published by you? What pose, bargain, stance, is it I must make with you now?…

…you dance so good, you dance so good, you dance so good…???”

“language is still a bunch of sturdy, glittering charms in the astonished hand.

A utopia of possibility. A utopia of choice.”

-Carole Maso-

“One of the funny things about experimentalism in regard to language is that most of it has not been done yet”

-Donald Barthelme-

“I am huddled around the fire of the alphabet, still”

-Carole Maso-

Again, doubt again. Having never been taken, accepted, acknowledged even, by a publisher, by the system of makers of books for the world, for others, after all of these years and millions of words and thousands of hours, doubt again. Fear.

I undo.

What is it we want of language? Need? And what needs language do? Be? And where is it that I fail?

And you dance, you dance, you dance (but apparently no “so good”).

I undo.

Having done so much.

I do. In a needing language needing body needing language another body. To incorporate. This body, these needs, what surrounds and infests it, needing embodiment. “Everything happens and everything that happens is part of the story” (Ronald Sukenick). I thought. I do.

I undo.

Because apparently not. Apparently what is needed, what needs languaging in this world, this one my body needs in, is needed in, does not incorporate my languaging as what is needed.

I undo.

I unravel with questions, with doubts. Perhaps I was wrong? I am wrong. I fear. What needs in me has to search its needs meeting. But it finds, I do.

I do.

My language needs language finds every day – E. M. Cioran, Samuel Beckett, Macedonio Fernandez, Ronald Sukenick, Franz Kafka, Franz Kline, Raymond Federman, the great Quixote, Laurence Sterne, Gertrude Stein, W. S. Merwin, Helene Cixous, William Bronk, Edmond Jabes, Clarice Lispector, Jorge L Borges, Lynne Tillman, Anne Carson, Nelly Sachs, Cees Nooteboom, Robert Frank, Alberto Giacometti, Emily Mason, M. M. Bakhtin, Jacques Derrida, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Thomas Bernhard, Paul Celan, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Jean-Luc Nancy, Janet Kaufmann…

on, on, on…

languaging needing languaging bodies languaging

I do.

I undo.

I redo.

Those “everything that happens” Carole Maso, Louise Bourgeois, Jacques Roubaud, Georgi Gospodinov, Julio Cortazar, Georges Perec, not abstracted, dissimilated, fantasized into shapes unlike our bodies, unlike our lives, with beginnings, middles, ends, developments and growths, tidiness and causes with effects, not like those “parts,” but “everything” the body needs, languaging, chaos and order, present filled with pasts opening into futures, “everything happens” continuing…

I redo.

Within moments I can feel unreality. In magazines, movies, in TV and books, in art. My body needs reality, realization, not escape, not lies and illusions, it is already made of them, honestly.

Beings needs languaging needs being.

I redo.

Hurt and joy, fear and calm, love and lack, pleasure and harm.

Not redemption, not heroes and heroines, not rights and wrongs or rites and songs. Not reasons or religions, but relations between, between true and false, between black and white, noise and quiet, living and dying, myself and my spouse and my children,

the “ethos of ambiguity” (Ilan Stavans), the dim and the grey-blue-black (Beckett), the marshes and steep climbs…

I do.

I undo.

I redo.

My body is experiencing, and to know it, feel it, sense it, be it, I need stories, I am looking for its languaging and I find it or I make it, I do, undo and redo.

If the codifying systems of bodies and languages do not share this body’s needs, then its needs are unique, but still met, what joy if the needs met needs might be shared.

I do.

I undo.

I redo.

The stairwells lead up and down, inside out, toward or away, each always and also their reverse, inverse, “other” – languaging bodies languaging…

I climb, I descend. I pass in and out, I move. I seek and find seeking,

do. undo. redo.

“closure is misanthropic”

-Lyn Hejinian-

How perfect is that?

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photo by Robert Frank

Good ol’ Franz

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“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

photo by Viggo Mortensen

Taking the word(s) further…

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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…