Great writing, in my opinion…
BEGIN-ING, a story by Antoine Volodine
Tag: Literature
Current Reading Sampling – 2016
I realized I have neglected this ever-changing list…for any who might be interested. So I updated it today…
2016
“I decided to continue drinking and living in just this way.
My whole life long”
– Georges Bataille
Chin-deep in labor, family, relationship & studies…
Works for survival:
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature
Samuel Beckett, The Grove Centenary Editions
Franz Kafka, I Am a Memory Come Alive
Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co.
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
William James, The Writings of William James
Edmond Jabes, The Book of Questions
Works that expand:
Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900
William Franke, A Philosophy of the Unsayable
Ian Hodder, Studies in Human-Thing Entanglement
Paolo Virno, When the Word Becomes Flesh
Werner Hamacher, Minima Philologica
Parataxis / Parallaxis
parataxis, n.
The placing of propositions or clauses one after another, without indicating by connecting words the relation (of coordination or subordination) between them, as in Tell me, how are you?.
“PARATAXIS, N.” OED ONLINE. OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, DECEMBER 2015.
Parataxis is a literary technique, in writing or speaking, that favors short, simple sentences, with the use of coordinating rather than subordinating conjunctions (from Greek for ‘act of placing side by side’; from para, ‘beside’ and tassein, ‘to arrange’; contrasted to syntaxis or hypotaxis).
It is also used to describe a technique in poetry in which two images or fragments, usually starkly dissimilar images or fragments, are juxtaposed without a clear connection. Readers are then left to make their own connections implied by the paratactic syntax.
WIKIPEDIA CONTRIBUTORS. “PARATAXIS.” WIKIPEDIA, THE FREE ENCYCLOPEDIA
parallaxis, n.
Difference or change in the apparent position or direction of an object as seen from two different points; (Astron.) such a difference or change in the position of a celestial object as seen from different points on the earth’s surface or from opposite points in the earth’s orbit around the sun. Also: (half of) the angular amount of such a difference or change; (Astron.) the angle subtended at a celestial object by the radius of the earth’s orbit, giving a measure of its distance from the earth; any of various similar measures of distance calculated by methods incorporating the motion of the sun relative to the local region of the galaxy, the proper motion of the observed body, the motions of a cluster of bodies having similar distances and speeds, etc.
“parallax, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2015. Web. 7 March 2016.
Parallax is a displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight, and is measured by the angle or semi-angle of inclination between those two lines. The term is derived from the Greek word παράλλαξις (parallaxis), meaning “alteration”. A parallax is the difference in the angular position of two stationary points relative to each other from different viewing positions.
Wikipedia contributors. “Parallax.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 28 Feb. 2016. Web. 7 Mar. 2016.
The Sickening of Stories
I am not certain why stories sicken me so. By “sicken” perhaps I mean something closer to depletion or boredom, gluttedness or exhaustion. By stories I mean shaped texts of language – narrative fictions, philosophical arguments, journals and declarations and ads.
“I don’t know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I’ll be able to tell another. Living souls, you will see how alike they are.”
– Samuel Beckett, The Expelled
It has something to do with that. My own writings sicken me faster than others, but all writings, once entangled in plots, developing characters, or pursuing a narrative…tend me toward disgust.
The motion of “progress,” falsity of construction, illusion of meaning begins to fray as language gets “handled” or forced into order. The squeezing and pressure and molding of shaped texts, especially as they develop into sections, seem bound to conform to the size of the creator. Many texts start out wildly, with chaotic promise, almost infinite exploding potentials – but threads develop, and lines, sentences form, and shapes, causes and results, actions and repercussions, and ever so surely the mass is twisted to the size of a snake. And then I’m tired, exhausted by “how alike they are.” We are. It is.
Language imploding and exploding. This is what I want. Language available like elements. Language operative in a chaotic surround, like experiencing. Language that doesn’t know next. Language becoming, not necessarily or even especially something – just becoming within/without human.
So I read words, less to learn or be entertained, less to follow or empathize, less to argue or understand, and more to exist in a sea of potential communication and commerce, to respond, to be open and closed by each term and their relations, to go on.
As if language were oxygen, blood, water. As if language were soil. As if language were all these mystifying, crazy, strange, different and unknown others surrounding us everywhere. As if language were environment. Context. Medium. Not tool. Not machinic. Not discipline. Not function. Not at our service or in our control.
We know that it’s not. It does indeed possess others – carries and transfers multitudes – times, cultures, histories, humans, vagaries of meanings. It is untamed and unpredictable, available and unsolvable, like ourselves. But we often use it for us rather than in or with us. We often torment it into cages and patterns, (I’m doing it now) – forced representation, desiccated potentials – marks of expression or intention or persuasion or telling.
I declare. I unravel. I investigate. I express. I guess. I wonder. I commit a sound to form. It leads. I resist. I say. I listen. It leads (each of us in particular ways). I resist. I ponder. It takes shape. Incites. I want. I resist. I query.
Doing and undoing language becomes the only way to use it and avoid strangling it down to my size. Persisting and resisting, experimenting and erasing, canceling / canceling-out, backwards, forwards, at the angular. Listening to others. Throwing in, throwing away. Desist. Insist. Consist. And delete. Chaos and pattern. Detangle, knot up. Fracture. Fragment. Avoid. A void. Void and null and emergent. Perhaps. Perhaps. The attempt to leave open. It suffers to form.
Sickening me.
Ends – the Means to Get There; or, Laramie says “OFF.”
I drill. I devour.
Kafka, Blanchot, Derrida, Bartleby. Pessoa, Nietzsche, Jabes, Beckett.
Into the absence of hope.
Of language.
Of body.
I drill and I devour.
Myself.
Vitality.
Capacity.
I try to think my end(s).
I want to get there.
I would like to make it to the end.
I would like to make the end.
I think. I serve. I love. I ask.
I care. I touch. I say. I listen.
I am not fulfilling.
I am never quite what is wanted.
I have never been “right” for a situation.
I am a person who tries very hard to be what is wanted.
I am a person who tries very hard to offer what is “good”.
How would I know?
– what is wanted?
– what is good?
I do not.
I am incapable.
But I DO know:
I AM NOT THAT.
(do not) BE HERE NOW.
simply : do not.
“I would prefer not to.”
“I will not”
No reason.
No anwer.
We are just humans.
Animals.
Purposeless.
Pointless.
Without reason(s).
Without meaning(s).
Without.
Still we go on
(for now)
Still we keep on
Still
On
On
On
OFF
(he said, said Laramie to Alias. “OFF.” He said, said Laramie to Alias. And then he was gone. Really. Gone.)
Sometimes it happens this way.
Sometimes.
OFF
Simply, over.
[Often, in my case and experience. They come, they go. There is a rush of blood to the brain and the loins. There is something I assume the others refer to as “hope,” – some reason to live, to go on, to pertain. Then OFF. Binary. Digital. Technology. Culture. Beings-in-relation. ON/OFF. Lights. ON/OFF. Progress. ON/OFF. Will. ON/OFF. Love. ON/OFF. Value. ON/OFF. Need. ON/OFF. Mood. ON/OFF. Everything binary. Irrational. Abstract. Illogical. Happenings, events, occurrences. ON/OFF. ON/OFF. Life. ON/OFF. Life. ON/OFF. Life. ON/OFF.
Life.
ON/OFF.
We are coming to an end.
I am coming to end.
We each come, to end.
The End.
The Writing of the Disaster
You think twice. You plan. I do these things.
Finally incapable of mind over matter. The capacity of drunkenness. Full experience.
The body. The lust and wanting. The work to let it alone. To surpass or supersede.
Supplant desire with will.
Language works with, on and in the body. Larynx, lung, tongue and movement. Gut, brain and blood.
Without satiating muscle. Without exhausting the possibilities. Without terminating lust.
I think twice. I plan. You do these things.
Intention. Commitment. Decision.
“I will transcend the body. I will overcome desire. I will compensate and supplant urges with verbs. Consonants will become my flesh’s contact and content. Interoperation with world will equate to traversing its languages. To write will be my sexuality. Language my intimate other.”
I will compose my satiation. I will think my end. I will language my undoing and completion. I will create what I need.
Still the body rises. Erects itself. Rushes and longs. Aches.
I rub language all over it. Stroke it with breath and sounds. Caress every part with a term. Toy and pleasure each hollow and tense with tongued noise.
It wants. It desires. I want. I desire. I long for what it says without diction.
Be Drunk
Charles Baudelaire, 1821 – 1867
You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.
But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.
And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.”
Language. Alcohol. Language. Alcohol. To void and satiate the body. To provide full experience. Pair satiating self. Ache and desire. Want and sensation. As a whole – the desire to be drunk – to fulfill – saturation of pleasure and knowledge – perception/sensation and abstraction/thought – TO RESPOND. Shower the body, challenge the mind. Work the muscles. Lingua the self. Tickle with letters and edges; heat, fill, temper and calm salve and sensitize the skin and organs – flood the whole: language and alcohol. Avoid depending on kind, species, occasion. Avoiding dependency.
How might an human organism satiate itself?
I dreamt language. I imagined correspondence, intelligence, sexuality, the wide-openness of commerce between one human and another. Particularity, difference, biology, culture, knowledge, capacity undoes this. Incapacitates convergence. Ruins union.
Intimacy with other = impossible.
Intimacy with self-system = ?
Language. Alcohol. Immaterial / Matter. Body-mind. Embodied mind. Enminded body. How solve desire? Lust, want, biology, sociology, anthropology (and so on) – the logoi of BEING HUMAN.
Be wild and crazy and drunk with Love,
if you are too careful, Love will not find you.
~Rumi
Love depends on Other. Love depends on converging, connection, call / response / return. Love is impossible. Cohesive mingling.
To say the unsayable. The reach beyond. The experiment, invention, imagine. Commerce with species and kind, taking it in (language), absorbing and transforming seeds, spewing it out (language). Giving / Giving Back. Receiving / Offering. Language – perfect intimacy seed. Perfect contact and context differentiating and responding each to each, body to body, mind to mind… sans orgasm, sans drunkenness, sans satiety… regardless of ecstatic fullness.
This is the disaster.
Unfillable.
Insatiable (body)
Satisfied mind.
This is the disaster.
The Neutre Becoming : Untitled Writing
“the writer must expose himself to his exteriority”
-William Brogan-
In the process of inscription, I am neutral. Ambiguously being. Neutered.
Existing via language that has not yet been written opens a sort of potential – possible becomings, as yet unknown, unidentified – possible positings of the impossible – WRITING enaction. I am unspecified before the letters which commence demonstrating what / who / how as It (this human) encounters them – imagines, recalls, learns, selects, experiments and undoes, chooses and deletes. Engaging with the sea. With hearsay and learning, words read or perceived, borrowing, borrowing, sifting and hybridizing.
From wherever, therefore, whomever, toward knows-not-what…IN THE MIDST…WRITING: activity, action, attempt…Everything trying.
A human. A person. Acting. Toward what ends? Perhaps to say. To express. To communicate. To discover. Invent. Investigate. Imagine. To play. To die. Not to die. Becoming / evincing / composing / traversing ‘knows-not-what.’ Anything. Nothing. Living…to Death.
This is why. This is why my own ‘need-to-write.’ To become. To try. To live on. To keep going. Living toward, forward, into… perhaps.
Not-knowing I do not know. At the edge, or a limit. Searching a way. To say. To discover. To hear. To emerge. Wanting to express, to find out, to dialogue – capable of expressing “Very little…almost nothing,” I “try again. Fail again,” and hopefully (but “no matter”) “fail better.”
The internal urgency to write rather than speak, or to speak writing or even write speaking arising when I don’t know the words with which to.
‘The need to write is linked to the point at which nothing can be done with words.”
-Maurice Blanchot-
Selecting the pen, scribbling into the paper when there are no words (that I know) for that which (before words) I experience an urgency toward.
Therefore…working and playing – experiment and effort – name-changing and changeling – It commences. Exploring. Expeditions into letters and language. Into sounds, mouths and breaths. Into indeterminate dreams and dubious memories. Desires and wishes and hopes. To connect or converge. To speak or hear back. To know by finding out. WRITING: to learn by failing.
“becom[ing] the empty place where the impersonal affirmation emerges”
-Maurice Blanchot-
Melancholy (Lispector, Pessoa, Beckett, Jabes, Kafka, Blanchot?) and ecstatic (Rilke, Mallarme?, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Cixous?) human activity/task/capacity. “Need.”
“That there is language.”
Begin. Again.
at the point at which nothing can be done with words
***************************
I attempt to express the extent of my experience of love…
Endeavor to language particular beauty…
Strive to tell you how I… try to say…
Make effort to describe my children, the cheek/lip/ankle/voice/presence of my beloved, the eye contact and thought-contact of a friend, paw of a kitten, core of a concept, element of a scent, a breeze, a trace, a view…
Venture some new construction, a world, characters, possibilities…directions and directives…
Ache to communicate…
Will to connect…
Crave to continue…
WRITING: TO LEARN (something?) BY FAILING
perhaps
“the attempt to open a space for the unsayable”
-maurice blanchot-
to fail…
The Need for Help
“I am affected not just by this one other or a set of others, but by a world in which humans, institutions, and organic and inorganic processes all impress themselves upon this me who is, at the outset, susceptible in ways that are radically involuntary. The condition of the possibility of my exploitation presupposes that I am a being in need of support, dependent, given over to an infrastructural world in order to act, requiring an emotional infrastructure to survive. I am not only already in the hands of someone else before I start to work with my own hands, but I am also, as it were, in the ‘hands’ of institutions, discourses, environments, including technologies and life processes, handled by an organic and inorganic object field that exceeds the human”
- – Judith Butler –
“Help!?”
He cried, it cried, I cried. But help, it will not come, for me. And why should it? Who could owe me assistance, and why? And what would it benefit another? Even how might the crying become? Often silent, unheard; a gesture or tone; a constant “I am unable to do this alone.” There’s no reason. No reason that someone might help me.
Help has come. Many times, and that greatly. Otherwise I would not be alive. Irrational, inconceivable, as ‘last measure,’ – the cry’s been expressed, even shouted or posted: “I need help or we will not survive!” And it’s come. Never “I.” The yelp always weighted with “we.” In deep over my head as a man, as a father, a worker and thinker as well – always “help!?” Needing contact or touch or attention. Needing hearing or care or advice. Needing teaching, protection, support. Needing money or sitters or transport. Needing food. Needing shelter. Such needs.
I need help. “I.”
Whatever effects or affects, I believe that I do try to help. To have food for my children, and beds. To respond to emotional traumas, disturbs – to hear and attend and comply. To love others embodied and minded. Within (my) reason, I do what I can to assist, especially those gathered about me. I experience my’self’ as RESPONSE-able – once engaged there’s a sense that I must. Some say that we choose to do good – but I question. Many insist we always have choice, yet I seem unable to abandon or neglect, unless, perhaps, my “self” or theoretically. I am prone to the “people are people” – shaped by time and engagements – to behave in the world as they are, and continue the way that they be (in small measure). The issues of scale and of time. We do what we can to survive. Some prone to survival of others, some not. Depends on the value of “self,” so it seems. I help, which develops that value (I hope). To think I might matter, be dependable/depended on, be important – to someone, somewhere, at some time. Survive.
And I notice myself ever howling for help. Help!? As I age, I distinguish the needs. Need for contact and talk – to think and to feel; needing help with evolving demands. “Man,” “parent,” “student,” “professional,” – all extensions of what I once was – just a “human.” I can’t even survive being that, let alone all these complex designations. Artificial “helps” like alcohol or nicotine, religious belief or “self-help” seem to do as much harm as relief. As babies and aged we are weakened…our “primes” occasioned by a nexus of supports. In our weakness, we comprehend need(s).
I need. “Help!?”
Without knowing what it is or might look like. I know that I’m drowning. I age. I know no one owes it, the benefits would have to be rationalized. I fail. I can’t go on. I must go on. I go on.
You must go on, that’s all I know.
They’re going to stop, I know that well: I can feel it. They’re going to abandon me. It will be the silence, for a moment (a good few moments). Or it will be mine? The lasting one, that didn’t last, that still lasts? It will be I?
You must go on.
I can’t go on.
You must go on.
I’ll go on. You must say words, as long as there are any – until they find me, until they say me. (Strange pain, strange sin!) You must go on. Perhaps it’s done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story. (That would surprise me, if it opens.)
It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don’t know, I’ll never know: in the silence you don’t know.
You must go on.
I can’t go on.
I’ll go on.
–Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable
All my Words are Silent 