Terrific collection of attempts at languaging mystery around incarnate language: https://maney.us/blog/2014/12/28/meditations-on-the-incarnation-from-select-church-fathers-and-doctors/
Tag: meaning
St. John Chrysostom: Homily on Christmas Morning
This is another post I made during Advent four years ago, which bears repeating. I have read this sermon by St. John Chrysostom (late fourth century …
St. John Chrysostom: Homily on Christmas Morning
The Songs I do not Know (ii)
Tell me the songs you don’t know
Dan Beachy-Quick, Of Silence and Song
Light…makes some things seen, makes some things invisible
-Sir Thomas Browne, in B-Q, Of Silence and Song
ii. “Tell me…”
bluebell. jay.
joy. blank. block.
blur. when.
what?
how. where. ever why.
now
it is very
most unknown
not knowing –
i don’t;
breathe
.
cerulean. youth.
abstract. asunder.
i wonder
what for
then
when now?
how does
one tell
not knowing
unknown
always
it sings
knowing
(its’ icon)
and melody
The Songs I Do Not Know (1)
“Tell me the songs you don’t know.”
Dan Beachy-Quick, Of Silence and Song
“–knowledge is made by oblivion.”
Sir Thomas Browne, in B-Q, Silence & Song
clips, or snippets,
the known as partial
notes
signifying
the experienced
gesturing
hymning (nearly celebrating)
its reverse –
everything
unknown
i didn’t know
the sounds of
as they were
always changing –
ever never
.
so i made noise
my shapes
transparently novel (novice)
windows
framing, marking, visibling
all i do not know –
every word an icon
view-finding
all it’s not
.
Image
Sound
Landscape
Intention
Meaning
Clarity of
.
definition
None
.
thus every song i sing
i sing of what i do not know
or hear or dream or feel
i think
but do i tell of songs
i do not know
or sing not knowing?
.
would i recognize
unknown
song?
do i?
sing?
.
it’s hard to tell
meaningful questions
from questioned
meanings,
meaning
tones
notion
her eyes
the water
sky
adroit
wonder
or passion
.
not known
i sing.
Language/Life
This is the same struggle – (LanguageLife)
this mis-match, trans-mesh, between media (their mediums)
.
A woman arrived – beautiful.
First thought: why isn’t language like her?
no – why isn’t language Her.
The difference. Media.
Eventually I felt this about music, painting, photography.
Eventually I felt this about perception, expression, myself.
.
i.e. Why isn’t one thing another to the same effect? Why doesn’t one temporally unified multiplicity (perception) correlate adequately in another?
.
My writing, these shapes, lines, movements, and possible sounds and touches and sayings are ever as real as hers, (equal), but not her (different) <in so many ways, sort of> <and not many ways, kind of>
.
There is animated material in motion with layers of perception – interpretation – impression / meanings. And here as well.
But they are not the same,
metaphorically, experientially, actually.
And they are.
(We are, species-level, carrying similar realities in similarly leaky containers).
And we aren’t.
- Effect (1)
- Affect (2)
- Mode (0)
- Artifice (N+1 / N-1)
- Occurrence Happening Being (=)
We are.
And aren’t.
Same Difference
.
Language lives. is alive. is not life. is life.
As also language.
And not.
She and I are. And are modally identified. Materially.
And are categorically for many striations,
same.
And not.
Effect. Affect. Also same difference, everywhere within scales. Eventually, no difference?
Eventually…only same? In a thin layer, deep and thickly.
Undone. Coordinated.
Same difference.
eventuates:
AND – – – – OR – – – – NOT
(same differencings, as each require equal potentialities)
.
Endless.
This is a slippery slope of a flat plane.
.
Therefore I love the “Book of Idolatry,” “truth,” empirical methods! Same differences, endlessly, potential, infinite variation and similitude. Swerving curves of identity deranged.
Lo how the mirror distorts in its clarity.
The painting clarifying distorted.
Voila.
Another.
The same.
Again.
Differently.
.
One might suppose differing due to activity – close circle – if static could be posited or possible we’d see (as we are seen). But seeing is active. As is that seen.
therefore, indeterminate
that is, knowably unknowable
i.e. uncertain in its certainty
Voila!
What?
same difference
BEING
matters
Deconstructing Definitions
Perhaps “work” means something must be done, regardless of desire,
and signifies felt effort.
If “to love’s” “unassailable affirmation,”
something verbal, and not only.
“Education” as “familiarity with thoughts of others” (K. O. Knausgaard),
entails “experience” as “familiarity with itself”?
And what of “wisdom”?
I wonder if “deaf” implies “not-listening,” or/and, “our forgetting of the body.”
and who defines “republic”?
Or “nowhere” and “now here” in all their differance?
Frere Jacques (yes, go and sing it)
suggests impossibility fuels valuation –
negation requiring its positive with –
terms all ways relative in their contexts,
indeterminate and groundless,
yet term-in-able, undecided, written-in.
I don’t know.
But I sense it’s indefinitive,
de- and con- structure something else,
like trace or foggy margin,
the space between the sounds
that continues (us and them).
What Words Do
“language cannot cope with its relation with the world”
– Giorgio Agamben –
“language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein –
Sometimes it seems that words might do anything! Connecting things and people; defining, describing, explaining and exclaiming; naming, inventing, questioning… arguing, fomenting, discovering; seducing, displacing, and singing. Very little experiencing of the human kind comes unaccompanied by terms. – Is that so?
There are dreams – like signs and billboards of liqueous or exaggerated perceivings… “the sign – is the quietest razor of darkness” (A. Dragomoshchenko)… and slit it does. We bleed.
And breathing, heart’s-pulse, sleeping along with the intake of food, its output as waste, our birthing and walking, working and running… and dying. All our play. Intercourse, of course. Do moans and groans, grunts and cries and sighs, lisps and complaints (our myriad utterances) – mean words? mean language? What of our relative silence? The thrumming body of the speechless and deaf? Eye-gaze dumb, its blindness?
The skin has been rubbed off my fingers.
Wordlessly, soundlessly, lust and desire screech on…shrill in body and bone – both where the starving exudes and toward its petulant prey.
What of the growth of grasses? Is language there? In rhythmic patterning of rain? A sense of sunlight?
Sometimes wind whispers.
A cat moves. Silently.
And a “sign – is the quietest razor of darkness” – darkness visible, darkness speaks – (it has been claimed – via words, the verbal).
Sweet and troubling confluence: activity and languaging (the same): the “verbal.” Of sound and motion. Our noise. Moving sound around in and with our bodies – in speech or dance, in strain and the clamor of being.
What falls (or grows, blooms, disappears) outside the devouring knife – that which segments and shrivels the fluid songs of experience and reverie? Of presence. The Slicer-Dicer we’ve composed, posing together to cut from faultless fabric?
As utterance, inscription fondles its way, brushingly and blade-like, sensually surreptitious. Caressing and crafty, rapaciously blessing its praying and braying of names – who can counter its reduction, repression, its blame or silvery shame?
Ye without words, cast the first stone.
As if genesis were language and time: space to create with.
Comprehensively unknown.
A Tenure & Promotion Dossier
To think.
To get done.
To be done.
To survive.
Get by.
Endure.
[what will feed and fuel us?
how might we grow like errant plants?]
There is weight, great,
like words of Beckett,
terse and heavy
with ridiculous
mind
To go on.
In spite of.
Anyway.
[to round a bend, turn it in, be relieved
to be accepted, acceptable, acknowledged.]
To count, to mean, to matter
Anyway.
Because
we happen
and go on…
[if I might vine, might drink the spoiled
to live, to thrive, to weed]
To make the turn
into what grows
anyway, despite
out of joint, or time, or space,
terrorized
refusal
The flagrant
Remainder
Unmerited
Surplus
[as if we were another sort, not a same-seeded,
same-growing, same-veined kind]
Even though at least one said:
“Everywhere
being is dancing”
and another
how alike are dancing and sex
And another
and another
the variety
the merited
surplus
We forgot.
Polysemic Stupor 