"To give language perspective is to shift the fundamental relationship between humanity and language, we have perspective not language is the wrong assumption. Language and perspective are one. Language is already a perspective. The minute you write, you become a body for language, you take on the perspective of language"
rhetorical philosophy
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Exquisite Horror of Reality
“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.”
Edgar Allen Poe
Edgar Allen Poe
Creative Game of Tag
by me :-)
I usually get hit with inspiration in unfortunate times when a pen and paper aren't handy...
It is then when the muse runs through me, a if I were some tool for her creativity, and then my thoughts construct themselves as articulate prose in my mind...
A wave of inspiration.
I become desperate to cling on to it, to consume it entirely before it disintegrates.
It floats into me and through me.
It saturates me.
It consumes me.
I become one with it.
But only for a brief moment until the words evaporate into an amorphous state and my ability to retain them in their beautiful form vanishes that instant.
I feel that as much as the poems chase me, I end up chasing them more.
We engage in a creative game of tag where sometime I win, and often not.
Creativity is an encounter: a little bit of me and a little bit of the other, wherever it originates from, enmeshed together for a brief instant at the horizon.
I usually get hit with inspiration in unfortunate times when a pen and paper aren't handy...
It is then when the muse runs through me, a if I were some tool for her creativity, and then my thoughts construct themselves as articulate prose in my mind...
A wave of inspiration.
I become desperate to cling on to it, to consume it entirely before it disintegrates.
It floats into me and through me.
It saturates me.
It consumes me.
I become one with it.
But only for a brief moment until the words evaporate into an amorphous state and my ability to retain them in their beautiful form vanishes that instant.
I feel that as much as the poems chase me, I end up chasing them more.
We engage in a creative game of tag where sometime I win, and often not.
Creativity is an encounter: a little bit of me and a little bit of the other, wherever it originates from, enmeshed together for a brief instant at the horizon.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
In the beginning...
From Jean Baudrillard
"In the beginning was the Word. It was only afterwards that Silence came.
The end itself has disappeared...."
on the topic of the disappearance of the real into the virtual
"In the beginning was the Word. It was only afterwards that Silence came.
The end itself has disappeared...."
on the topic of the disappearance of the real into the virtual
Vanishing Point of Language
From "Why hasn't everything already disappeared" by Jean Baudrillard
"Have we not always had the deep-seated phantasy of a world that would go on without us? The poetic temptation to see the world in our absense, free of any human, all-too-human will? The intense pleasure of poetic language lies in seeing language operating on its own, in its materiality and literality, without transiting through meaning- this is what fascinates us. It is the same with anagrams or anamorphoses, with the 'figure in the carpet'. The Vanishing Point of Language"
"Have we not always had the deep-seated phantasy of a world that would go on without us? The poetic temptation to see the world in our absense, free of any human, all-too-human will? The intense pleasure of poetic language lies in seeing language operating on its own, in its materiality and literality, without transiting through meaning- this is what fascinates us. It is the same with anagrams or anamorphoses, with the 'figure in the carpet'. The Vanishing Point of Language"
Chased by a poem
From a speech by Elizabeth Gilbert on creativity
"I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who's now in her 90s, but she's been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, "run like hell." And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she'd be running and running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it "for another poet." And then there were these times -- this is the piece I never forgot -- she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right?So, she's running to the house and she's looking for the paper and the poem passes through her,and she grabs a pencil just as it's going through her, and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it.She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first."
"I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who's now in her 90s, but she's been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, "run like hell." And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she'd be running and running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it "for another poet." And then there were these times -- this is the piece I never forgot -- she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right?So, she's running to the house and she's looking for the paper and the poem passes through her,and she grabs a pencil just as it's going through her, and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it.She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first."
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Itches and Words
"You reach for a word as you reach for an itch" -Merleau-Ponty
it is that instinctual...
it is that instinctual...
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Remarkable Creatures
From artandculture.com
"Literature does not have the guarantee of immediacy which, say, the Visual Arts or Film or Music all enjoy. Its medium is the written word: there's no color, no sound, no bodies leaping to and fro - there's not even speeches to be made. The literary realm is a silent theater, spectral, a place where words roam in search bodies to inhabit. But rather then this disembodiment being a hindrance, it affords Literature a great freedom. For words are remarkable creatures and grammar an infinitely complex structure in which anything can happen. Literature may be silent but words can certainly scream, or whisper, moan, decry, they can announce and seduce - with all the subtleties and nuance of the voice. Nabakov's prose offers nibbles of nymphets, his words a caress; Melville delivers a whale in all its unwieldiness right to our doorstep; Maurice Blanchot whispers of death, haunting our every move with the inevitable's power; Montiagne's essays reveal a man more astutely than any gestures of hand or face; Homer carries us to impossible lands, letting us dance with gods. Now, other arts may offer similar possibilties, but only the word can go anywhere it may please and be anything it may desire: the word can taste of taffy, smell of sordid nights, it can whisk across your face with the vigor of a lover's slap or tickle your knees with a well-placed verb. Freed from the constraints of the body, words can meander across boundaries, through the smallest crevice, past all defenses to nestle deep within the body's skin tight fortress."
"Literature does not have the guarantee of immediacy which, say, the Visual Arts or Film or Music all enjoy. Its medium is the written word: there's no color, no sound, no bodies leaping to and fro - there's not even speeches to be made. The literary realm is a silent theater, spectral, a place where words roam in search bodies to inhabit. But rather then this disembodiment being a hindrance, it affords Literature a great freedom. For words are remarkable creatures and grammar an infinitely complex structure in which anything can happen. Literature may be silent but words can certainly scream, or whisper, moan, decry, they can announce and seduce - with all the subtleties and nuance of the voice. Nabakov's prose offers nibbles of nymphets, his words a caress; Melville delivers a whale in all its unwieldiness right to our doorstep; Maurice Blanchot whispers of death, haunting our every move with the inevitable's power; Montiagne's essays reveal a man more astutely than any gestures of hand or face; Homer carries us to impossible lands, letting us dance with gods. Now, other arts may offer similar possibilties, but only the word can go anywhere it may please and be anything it may desire: the word can taste of taffy, smell of sordid nights, it can whisk across your face with the vigor of a lover's slap or tickle your knees with a well-placed verb. Freed from the constraints of the body, words can meander across boundaries, through the smallest crevice, past all defenses to nestle deep within the body's skin tight fortress."
Monday, March 15, 2010
Silence and Nothingness
"Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness"
-Samuel Beckett
-Samuel Beckett
Bridges over the abyss
"The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss"
-Italo Calvino
-Italo Calvino
Friday, March 12, 2010
Paradigm Shift
**rhetoric 10, Coffeen
Our task is to shift how we think about language as not a vehicle of communication but an act that rearranges relationships
Any text is a speech act, rearranging different parts of reality and their relations among themselves
language becomes a choreography of your experience
it works you over
it always enacts the world rather than merely representing it
Our task is to shift how we think about language as not a vehicle of communication but an act that rearranges relationships
Any text is a speech act, rearranging different parts of reality and their relations among themselves
language becomes a choreography of your experience
it works you over
it always enacts the world rather than merely representing it
Narratives and Identity
Each moment, we are recreated and a new self emerges as a part of a continuously evolving identity in the making. Identity, on some level, is rooted in a narrative. Narrative "creates us the very moment it is being created". It is through narrative that we are able to merge the various unfolding selves in which existence takes form. Narrative attempts to integrate the self that has been actualized in the past, the self that is unfolding in the present and the future self, that has yet to be born into existence. The stories we live by bridge the unstable, transitional, fleeting, situated selves into a coherent, discrete identity. They give form to our being.
But in the process of narrating the past self, we always forget. Each experienced moment vanishes into the abyss of our past and only a fragmented memory of it remains. The present is immediately transformed into an abstraction. In retelling, each lived moment is reduced to a brief summary, a couple of adjectives, a vague impression. Our memory fails us. Remembering thus...."is not the opposite of forgetting. It is a form of forgetting"
"An important challange to humanity is to recognize that lives are the pasts we tell ourselves"-Ochs & Capps
I think I'll dedicate the rest of my life to exploring the phenomenon of language.
But in the process of narrating the past self, we always forget. Each experienced moment vanishes into the abyss of our past and only a fragmented memory of it remains. The present is immediately transformed into an abstraction. In retelling, each lived moment is reduced to a brief summary, a couple of adjectives, a vague impression. Our memory fails us. Remembering thus...."is not the opposite of forgetting. It is a form of forgetting"
"An important challange to humanity is to recognize that lives are the pasts we tell ourselves"-Ochs & Capps
I think I'll dedicate the rest of my life to exploring the phenomenon of language.
Linguistic Realities
It is a choreography of my experience.
Nothing is more intimately intertwined with my reality.
It permeates my deepest thoughts.
It structures them.
As I enter its realm, it dictates how
My mouth moves to create every single utterance,
brimming with bottomless depths of meaning.
I don't speak it, it speaks me.
Every moment is rhetoric is motion.
A reality waiting to be read.
All aspects of the world are texts
Waiting to be read.
I am at your mercy, a tool.
Speak me.....
Nothing is more intimately intertwined with my reality.
It permeates my deepest thoughts.
It structures them.
As I enter its realm, it dictates how
My mouth moves to create every single utterance,
brimming with bottomless depths of meaning.
I don't speak it, it speaks me.
Every moment is rhetoric is motion.
A reality waiting to be read.
All aspects of the world are texts
Waiting to be read.
I am at your mercy, a tool.
Speak me.....
Ghostly Creatures
from: www.artandculture.com
"Socrates refused to write. He said that to write something down is to disembody it: words are left to float here and there, ghostly creatures, perverse and perverted by whatever and whomever they encounter. Of course, we only know what Socrates said because it was written. Two thousand years later, French philosopher Jacques Derrida says everything is writing, always and already. He says that when Socrates was speaking he was secretly writing, behind his own back, with and without knowing it: Plato's pen was really Socrates'. For Derrida, language is fundamentally ghostly, even when it's in our heads, when we try to put a word to a thing or idea. Language never had, has, or will have a body. So, what is a text? What is language? What does it mean to write something down and have someone read it clear across the globe, across centuries, perhaps in a different language? Is there a timeless meaning that hovers above the text, guaranteeing its meaning? Or does the meaning itself change? What determines that change? Can the author live up to his or her title in order to act as an authority, controlling the meaning of the words even if he or she has been dead 500 years? Does the reader control the meaning, in a sense rewriting the book as he or she reads? Or does the meaning emerge somewhere else, between the author, the reader, the words, the time, place, and mood? If a book is such an eruption of experience, what makes it the same book over time? Literary theory lives and breathes in the service of these questions"
"Socrates refused to write. He said that to write something down is to disembody it: words are left to float here and there, ghostly creatures, perverse and perverted by whatever and whomever they encounter. Of course, we only know what Socrates said because it was written. Two thousand years later, French philosopher Jacques Derrida says everything is writing, always and already. He says that when Socrates was speaking he was secretly writing, behind his own back, with and without knowing it: Plato's pen was really Socrates'. For Derrida, language is fundamentally ghostly, even when it's in our heads, when we try to put a word to a thing or idea. Language never had, has, or will have a body. So, what is a text? What is language? What does it mean to write something down and have someone read it clear across the globe, across centuries, perhaps in a different language? Is there a timeless meaning that hovers above the text, guaranteeing its meaning? Or does the meaning itself change? What determines that change? Can the author live up to his or her title in order to act as an authority, controlling the meaning of the words even if he or she has been dead 500 years? Does the reader control the meaning, in a sense rewriting the book as he or she reads? Or does the meaning emerge somewhere else, between the author, the reader, the words, the time, place, and mood? If a book is such an eruption of experience, what makes it the same book over time? Literary theory lives and breathes in the service of these questions"
Cracked Kettles
from: Gustave Flaubert in "Madame Bovary"
Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.
Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.
Words in Exile
***From Chabad.org
There are no things. There are only words. The Divine Words of Creation.
The words become fragmented, their letters scattered.
Only then are they called things; for scattered, they have no meaning.
Words in exile.
If so, their redemption lies in the story we tell with them. How we reorganize fragments into meaning, things into words, redefining what is real and what is not, and living life accordingly.
Life is in the interpretation of the words G-d gives us.
There are no things. There are only words. The Divine Words of Creation.
The words become fragmented, their letters scattered.
Only then are they called things; for scattered, they have no meaning.
Words in exile.
If so, their redemption lies in the story we tell with them. How we reorganize fragments into meaning, things into words, redefining what is real and what is not, and living life accordingly.
Life is in the interpretation of the words G-d gives us.
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