another entry from the distant past…
I am that I am
(click title to view)
Tag: language
A Letter of Yearning Light – Friday Fictioneers 1-17-2014
It mingles as I tarry here. Fence and branches joining what they distinguish. From here to there I yearn. Details all so near. In my reaching they grow hazy. I long for you. I follow. I wander. Toward you? From me? Out beyond?
There was a time. It’s lost its focus. Forward, back, I cannot tell. I am here. A something-is divides us. Even as it joins. I reach across. I feel you back. And yet.
Yet not. The moony sun illuminates. Draws attention. Drawing all the lines connecting us, all the angles between.
**********************
Many thanks to Rochelle Wisoff-Fields and Erin Leary‘s image
for the continuous and faithful prompts to compose 100 words
responding to instigating images and the Friday Fictioneers participants
“A book begins by defining ‘Who I am’; it ends by asking ‘Who am I?’
We are allergic to the world; consciousness is an allergic reaction to the fact of the world; it is our understanding that is a form of irritation, a rewarding irritation, and we think, because we think, we have accomplished something noble, something valorous, that we can say what it is something means; but it is just a symptom of the allergy, the mind trying to rid itself of itself, of what enters it by casting it back out, words for world.”
-Dan Beachy-Quick-
“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!
Influence : Fragments from the Introduction : “Nothing is quite as real as nothing”
I am currently reading Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution by Pascale Casanova, introduced by Terry Eagleton
Beckett has always been a favorite of mine – for economy, humor, profundity, examination and exploration. The following exemplify elements of this – quotations from simply the Introduction (by Eagleton) of this study…
“His work, in short, presents us with the scandal of a literature which no longer depends on a philosophy of the subject”
“every sentence of his writing keeps faith with our sense of powerlessness”
“nothing is quite as real as nothing”
“sublimity includes that which is barely visible as well as the immense and immeasurable, since both are equally ungraspable”
“there is no more truly historical phenomenon in art than form – which is quite as much saturated in social signification as so-called content”
Beckett presents “questions addressed by texts to themselves, queries about their own procedures and conditions of possibility”
“clear-eyed attempts at an exact formulation of the inarticulable…the extreme scrupulousness with which it sculpts the void”
“writing itself becomes for Beckett the very signifier of the failure which so gripped his imagination”
“places the very impediment to writing at the center of his writing, transforming the question of failure into the very form of his art, telling incessantly of the failure to tell”
Thanks Samuel.
Thinking Literac(ies)
“Ultimately we find that the cognitive consequences are more about the new meaning systems and activities that occupy our minds than they are just about the character of work with symbols…”
“Whether one form of inscription is more efficient or more easily learned than another (the asserted alphabetic advantage) may be less consequential in its cognitive consequences than if a society has developed a large bureaucracy, literary culture, philosophic tradition, technology, commerce, and educational system using whatever form(s) of inscription it has historically developed”
“The world we know, think about, and act within is saturated by and structured on the texts that travel from place to place and have some durability over the years. The built symbolic world on which we have elaborated new social meanings and relationships and that is the object of our thought and attention as we try to live our lives as successfully as we can within it, in that we find the consequences of literacy.”
“literacy is part of the stuff out of which a way of life is made”
-Charles Bazerman, Social Implications of Writing-
Found Autobiography
A country mapped with invisible ink
Like we are the hole that grows in poor, unmendable
nothing: we blind needles: we unmoored threads:
like feeling I’m the enaction of a waterfall by my tongue
.
upon your body, as when a boat is brought to the edge
of exile and a hand extends to a hand or a tree
beseeches with its shadeshawl: however born,
.
there is reaching, we agree the wind smelled of copper
one day, a passport the next: like how to escape
my brain’s slum of words, the ghetto of the said,
.
while adoring there the rocks, the teacups,
if half of me is a Molotov cocktail and half
the inflection of loss and half a genuflection
.
to breath: like wondering if this extra half
is a country mapped with invisible ink:
like how windows ask to come along with the going
.
and preside over the staying, and I look at them
with all the love, all the shatter I can muster:
shards cutting me when I try to put the sky,
.
the distance back together: boredom cutting me
deeper when I don’t: like searching for a man
in a burning house and finding a piano as echo flees:
.
a whetstone still warm from the blade: sheets pressed
with brainfolds of sleep: a whisper from the bathroom
of running water: but no body: and I carry
.
these things to safety that are not the man: the piano
in my arms, running water in my mouth, the vespers
of sleep, the knife, so like a wing, like flight:
.
and say of him, that was me, to the ashes, the char:
and sift the memory of flames for their sorrow,
holding smoke to the mirror interested only
.
in solid dreams: like it will finally see
what isn’t there and give it my face, this presence
of absence I have tried and tried not to be
**********
“almost as if I’m making her and this poem and my past
up as I go, to help me feel nothing
.
goes to waste, not even waste.”
-also Bob Hicok
All my Words are Silent 