Unstillable

scribbling

“Pangs of faint light and stirrings still.  Unformable graspings of the mind.  Unstillable”

– Samuel Beckett –

Let’s loiter about here a little, as if language were lakelike, locatable, alive enough to lollygag loose within.  Perhaps not.  Perhaps it is nearly always just-becoming.  Perhaps nearly all, nearly always, is thus: just-becoming – liminal lineaments languishing-then-livened, languishing-then-livened, “again” we might say, designating (de-term-ining) a balance to enlivened.  How so?  Why so?  By what author(ity)?

Unstillable.

“In the madhouse of skull and nowhere else” (– Samuel Beckett).  Is that so?

“Skin has no choice but to converse with the world…thin, ignorant borderland of skin…myself all trespass, misunderstanding, translating, translating…” (-Laurie Sheck).  Is that so?

If words were invented with sense.  To “make sense” between one and an ‘other.’ 

What if words ARE THAT?  Connective contours between.

I am inebriated, my willingness loosened to expression, though it might ruin me (like language) and I stare (Dostoevsky – ‘Myshkin’) “intently” into Mikhail Bakhtin’s face, his specific eye-gaze, and say:

“Is it the case that words are ‘meant,’ are ‘formed,’ are breathed, are…constructed, are…utilized, to be tissue woven between ‘me’…and ‘you’?”

Do we… speak, say, expire back and forth… to become?  To string and weave lines, flows, strands, threads, that might forge or invent co-respondence, texture, significations combining you and myself into WE?

But Bakhtin is dead, and cannot answer.  Mikhail Bakhtin does not have the capacity to co-respond.

…like Beckett, Blanchot, Plato, Montaigne, Pessoa, Pascal, Wallace or Euclid, Bulgakov, Heraclitus, or Celan (as with any and all dead!) he emits traces (tracings) with which I can consider, decipher, and interrogate in and within my ‘selves’ but not between

What might this ‘mean’ – between anyone?  Nothing.

It can not, has no opportunity to, delineate or circumscribe, draft, figure or shape any relation.

Sign emitted, call evoked, death, and then text as silent partner.  Prognostic retrograde delineation.

Bankrupt, impassible, impossible, communique.

The decoding of words as communication, connection?  An imaginary.  A handling of terms.  Inventing, devising, originary.  With whom?  Where?  How?   Hint and vestige, remnant and sketch, scheme and fabrication, inkling and outline.

Unstillable. Unformable graspings of the mind.  Is that so?

If we’re limning the liminal now, let’s loosen the letters and slacken the sieves.  Lasso and lounge, scatter and scrape, together (to gather) – a scintillate sense – sporadic sparks, succulent scenarios – exist for enlivening language, whatever limited lust lies therein – if language is locatable and not merely modal mechanics?  A modicum of music then, some scrap of sonority, some lingual litmus ‘making sense.’  Whatever.  Possibility, potential, particible particulars…

“THE TEST IS COMPANY”

“If there may not be no more questions let there at least be no more answers”

– Samuel Beckett, Company

“We must not die: kindred spirits will be found”

– Viktor Shklovsky –

 

The Perfect Sense of Embodiment

I have recently had the good fortune of correspondence with a tremendous thinker of whose work I have greatly admired and utilized continuously.  At some point he queried me as to my central concern or research interest which I pondered over a number of days.  About a year ago I recognized that filtering through all of my curiosities and fascinations (passionate inquiries) – in the end they were all about ways that meaning might be made for humans.  Thus I figured semiosis or semiotics was my central field of concern.  How we forge meaning in our surrounds.  As I’ve pursued library and information science I have attuned to the eagerness with which we as a species produce, hoard and waste information.  We’ve produced veritable clouds of data/information/knowledge and now it seems as if we swoon and drown in it.  For meaning, this cosmos of affordances must be utilized, integrated, incorporated.  As technologies explode and become increasingly symbiotic or synergistic with our own bodies and purposes, I have found that my responsive concern is one of remembering that the nexus or filament-combining locus for humans is the body.  No meaning can be had without the physical processes on which our being relies.  Every think I can think rests on the chemistry and material flows that comprise my organism.  It seems that even while we seek to develop intelligent robots and machines, ubiquitous data-recording and instinct-responsive computing, work with data sets increasingly monumental and robust, that a strong percentage of the human populace has the idea that the stigmergy and emergence of virtual social realities construct meaning, promise, potentiality.  I am not denying the fascinating quality of our rhizomic replications of our actual interconnectedness, overlap and interdependent influence, but I am committed to the fact that meaning only arises as relations are incorporated.  The translation and transformation of continuous relational events whether electronic and virtual or face-to-face and co-present into MEANING only occurs organismically, physically, presently in the knotting of convergences through our embodied existence.  Emotion, sensation, cognition, movement all ALWAYS play a part in the construction of meaning.  These are my thinkings/feelings.

In keeping with that, serendipitously my wife and I happened to view “The Perfect Sense” – a movie pursued to listen to Max Richter‘s incredible soundtrack in action – but resulting in a sort of visual commentary on my above thoughts.  We recommend it!  And would love to hear what you think!