-Gilles Deleuze-
from article Literature & Life (read full here)
To all of you out there loving, protecting, nurturing, listening, comforting, engaging and delighting in your children:
which, as my wife’s card to me pointed out, cannot be incoincidentally unjumbled into:
oh the gifts and joys a good father offers!
and the unmeasurable joy and delight brought a man by fathering.
I’veย recently acquired (via Inter-Library Loan! ย Woo-hoo!!!) a collection of writings exhibited below:
which opens with an essay by anthropologist Tim Ingoldย who starts it off with a remarkable movement through slugs and storms, lines-earth-eather, Kandinsky, Klee, Merleau-Ponty, and others – investigating them through a concept of “meshwork.”
“By this I mean an entanglement of interwoven lines. ย These lines may loop or twist around one another or weave in and out. ย Crucially, however, they do not connect. ย This is what distinguishes the meshwork from the network. ย The lines of the network are connectors, each given as the relation between two points, independently and in advance of any movement from one toward the other…the lines of a meshwork, by contrast, are of movement or growth. ย They are temporal ‘lines of becoming’…Life is a proliferation of loose ends. ย It can only be carried on in a world that is not fully joined up. ย Thus the very continuity of life – its sustainability, in current jargon – depends on the fact that nothing ever quite fits..”
-Tim Ingold,ย “Lines and the Eather”-
Journeying on from there through Deleuze and Guattari, mood and weather, meteorology and aesthetics he arrives at a conception of fleshย as both meshwork (exhalation) and atmosphere (inhalation) – a whole-being experience of relation enabling and realizing animate life….
I’ve now been browsing numerous writings by Ingold, fascinated by the semiotic/anthropologico/ontological /scientific meshwork his production encompasses… Thankfully, he makes much of his work available full and free to us… if you’re interested – I risk the promise it will be worth your while…
and a fascinating working paper as introduction: ย Realities: Bringing Things to Life
On “the writer type”:
“One can describe this type as the person in whom the irredeemable solitude of the self in the world and among people comes most forcefully to mind: ย as the sensitive person who is never given his due; ย whose emotions react more to imponderable reasons than to compelling ones; who despises people of strong character with the anxious superiority a child has over an adult who will die half a lifetime before he will; who feels even in friendship and love that breath of antipathy that keeps every being distant from others and constitutes the painful, nihilistic secret of individuality; who is even able to hate his own ideals because they appear to him not as goals but as the products of the decay of his idealism. ย These are only isolated and individual instances, but corresponding to all of them, or rather underlying them, is a specific attitude toward and experience of knowledge, as well as of the material world that corresponds to it.”
On the writer’s region (“nonratioid”):
“There is no better way to characterize this region than to point out that it is the area of the individual’s reactivity to the world and other individuals, the realm of values and valuations, of ethical and aesthetic relationships, the realm of the idea…in this region facts do not submit, laws are sieves, events do not repeat themselves but are infinitely variable and individual…there is in the writer’s territory from the start no end of unknowns, of equations, and of possible solutions. ย The task is to discover ever new solutions, connections, constellations, variables, to set up prototypes of an order of events, appealing models of how one can be human, toย invent the inner person…which then nevertheless branches out somewhere into a boundless thicket, although not without somehow fulfilling its purpose…”
These quotes come from his exceptional small essayย Sketch of What the Writer Knows
which I desperately wanted to reproduce here…
if it “rings true” for you – please find a mentor and friend in Robert Musil:
Welcome!
I venture to say this piece is unnamed and unfinished, but I tell you itโs alive and it dances!
I can touch it with my hands.ย The wax is smooth like flesh, the collage like scars or scabs โ where the texture lies.
Up close โ I am underwater on sand, watching the fluxing of weeds.ย Looking for retinal patterns.
At a distance it traces a woman, her dress kicking out, a-twirl and limning the lithe.
Iโm entranced!
Itโs Chinese scriptwork of wisdom and way, a beautiful nude languidly branding the air with her limbs โ fertile signs and images prodding me โ โmove!โ
Move myself.
Activate.
Address.
What looks like dark ink stands out, but in reality swims under the surface โ blotting, inscribing and guiding the paths.
Emotion and gesture alike: drawn swiftly and sourced far beneath, or pressed on and affixed from outside.ย Each leave their marks โ stark and prominent, – resonant emblems of what lies beneath, what responds.
I pretend I am calm, blank canvas to world โ but when it brushes or cuts, smothers or slaps, what is bold in me reveals.ย The fears, the wounds, the anger and dream.
My vision scatters in rage.ย Vehement dashing and strike.ย I can promise you this: the world will reveal me.
I have told you: you are with the unknown of the unnamed – a nothing answering to nothing โ a cooperative become.
At the end I will be named, will have accumulated and inscribed them.ย Surface, object, ground: our object.
Enaction.
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