Art is real

Art is real. I make it real by putting it into words

Narrative accounts

There's a good case for arguing that any narrative account is a form of fiction. The moment you start to arrange the world in words, you alter its nature. The words themselves begin to suggest patterns and connections that seemed at the time to be absent from the events the words describe.

English Language

The English language is not a square with definite sides containing its area; it is a circle, but a circle such as Euclid never contemplated, having its centre a point which hath many parts, and nowhere bounded by any line called a circumference. It is a spot of colour on a damp surface, which shades away imperceptibly into the surrounding colourlessness; it is an illuminated area in a midnight landscape, whose beams practically end somewhere, though no eye hath beheld the vanishing line.

-James Murray

Evolution of language

To enchain syllables and to lash the wind are equally undertakings of pride

-Samuel Johnson

Language of film

Film speaks in neologisms. When a language does not already exist, one must be something of an artist to speak it, however poorly. For to speak it is partly to invent it, whereas to speak the language of everyday is simply to use it"
Mertz

Resistance to theory

The resistance to theory is the resistance to the use of language about language.

"Ibid.

Second soul

To have a second language is to have a second soul

Charlemagne

Meaning of "is" is

"It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is."
- William Jefferson Clinton 

Beneficiary and Victim

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.

- Aldous Huxley

Preventing Communication

But behavior in the human being is sometimes a defense, a way of concealing motives and thoughts, as language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.

- Abraham Maslow

Euphemisms

Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.

- Quentin Crisp

Foreign Language

‎"Life is a foreign language; all humans mispronounce it." Christopher Morley

Fossil Poetry

"Language is fossil poetry"

-Emerson

Every Form of Expression

"In a sense, every form of expression is imposed upon one by social factors, one's own language above all.

 Edward Sapir

Invisible

"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible" 
— Vladimir Nabokov

Rhythm of a lost word

"The rhythm of a lost word may be there without a sound to clothe it…. Everyone must know the tantalizing effect of the blank rhythm of some forgotten verse, restlessly dancing in one's mind, striving to be filled out with words" (William James). 

Depth of thought

"There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sight and sound. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought" (Hurston). 

Art

Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know
-Sapir

Trembling with Desire

"Language is skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the top of words. My language trembles with desire"

Barthes

Literature

"Literature holds the mechanisms of repair. Literature has the capacity to ameliorate our society's ills...Literature stanches that wasteful draining away of conscience and memory. Literature experiences us as multidimensional persons. Literature deals with consequences."

Toni Morrison

Nothing in the world makes sense

"It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense. Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything. The stupider they are, the wider they conceive their horizons to be. And if an artist decides to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees--this in itself constitutes a considerable clarity in the realm of thought, and a great step forward."

Chekov

Books that bite us

"Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book does not shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe."

-Kafka

Words by Anne Sexton

Be careful of words, 

even the miraculous ones. 
For the miraculous we do our best, 
sometimes they swarm like insects 
and leave not a sting but a kiss. 
They can be as good as fingers. 
They can be as trusty as the rock 
you stick your bottom on. 
But they can be both daisies and bruises.

Yet I am in love with words. 
They are doves falling out of the ceiling. 
They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap. 
They are the trees, the legs of summer, 
and the sun, its passionate face.

Yet often they fail me. 
I have so much I want to say, 
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc. 
But the words aren't good enough, 
the wrong ones kiss me. 
Sometimes I fly like an eagle 
but with the wings of a wren.

But I try to take care 
and be gentle to them. 
Words and eggs must be handled with care. 
Once broken they are impossible 

things to repair

History

The meaning of history is disclosed by language, determined by it. Language does not unfold within history. History unfolds within language

On Saussure

The object of man's conflicts

In appearance, speech may well be of little account, but prohibitions surrounding it reveal its links with desire and power. This should not be very surprising, for psychoanalysis has already shown us that speech is not merely the medium that manifests-or dissembles- desire; it is also the object of desire. Similarly, historians have constantly impressed upon us that speech is no mere verbalization of conflicts and systems of domination, but that it is the very object of man's conflicts.
-Foucault

Myth and Language

Myth is language: to be known, myth has to be told; it is part of human speech

A small scratch

I didn't notice, each of your words was like small scratch and I felt like I was gonna get away unharmed, but by the time you were done I was empty and everything on the inside was out.

-disembodied poetics

Form

Language is a form, not a substance

-Saussure

Nature is Written

"Why write? Just as life's squirming past leaves its traces in Earth's crust, so the here and now, exploding simultaneously and surreally with the reality of possibility and possibility of reality, is all that we have ever had. Why record it? It records itself. The authors of the Good Book were right: Nature begins as a text as well as earth. It is silly to write because everything is already written, at least to someone who truly knows how to read"

D. Sagan

The Ultimate Horizon

If phenomenology is precisely the science of the appearing-as-appearing, language is its ultimate horizon: the act of bringing things to light as appearances which does not itself appear as such

Kearney On Heidegger

On Structuralism

It is not man who speaks language but language who speaks man

Objective of the Human Sciences

The objective of the human sciences is

the expressive and speaking existence.

-Mikhail Bakhtin

The being of literature

Language is the being of literature , its very world

-Barthes

Language isn't about communication

Language isn't about communication. Language is used to get things done. Communication is the means.

~Anonymous

Things I had no words for

"I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way- things I had no words for."
Georgia Okeeffe

Sum of Languages

I am the sum of my languages

-E Hoffman

Limiting the World

"God created heaven and earth. But one should be able to put it better. To say that the limits of language, of my language are those of the world, of my world. And that in speaking, I limit the world, I end it. And when mysterious, logical death abolishes these limits there will be no question, no answer, just vagueness. But if things come into focus again this can only be through the rebirth of conscience. Everything follows from this. I don't know where or when, just that it happened"

-anonymous

Qualities

Words give glass quality to glass, blood to blood and life to life itself

-Pablo Neruda

Living Creatures

The words of a living language are like creatures; they are alive. Each word has a physical character, a look and a personality, an ancestry, an expectation of life and death, a hope of posterity

-Morris Bishop

Anachronistical Misuse

"To grasp the essence of the Greek language (and any language for that
matter) is to understand the historical framework in which it is
found. Languages are culturally conditioned. Therefore, it is
important to be aware that there is the possibility of worldview
confusion, in which we take a contemporary understanding of a word and
anachronistically misuse the same word found in scripture."
-R Villodas

No Exits

by me

You live in the shadows of metaphors
Perpetually collapsing into worn out cliches
Concepts carving out the space in your mind
The architecture of your thoughts
Dictated by language
You are subjugated
And you don't even know it

Can you feel it?
This elusive moment
On the tip of the wave of becoming the next

It is tearing down your syntax

Your words
They are dying to become sentences
So they can then aggregate
Into discourse
And thrive in dominion

Where are you?
Pushed into the corners by concepts
That you take for granted

What does it feel like?
This moment
Right now
To float in the abyss
In the absense of language
Words are present
But they exist in isolation
Torn from their syntactical threads
Reduced
To lonely images
Meaningless

An elusive moment of freedom pervades
The bliss of experience of life
Outside the prism of words
It is amorphous
And overwhelming
Like a blinding light
Can you feel it?

Hmmmm

Feels like a dream

Don't it?

My deepest apologies
It was
In the realm of Language
There are no exits

What We Say and What We See

"the relation of language to painting is an infinite relation. It is
not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visible,
they prove insuperably inadequate. Neither can be reduced to the
other's terms: it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see
never resides in what we say. And it is in vain that we attempt to
show, by the use of images, metaphors, or similes, what we are saying;
the space where they achieve their splendor is not that deployed by
our eyes but that defined by the sequential elements of syntax"
Foucault

A Kind of Music

"The bigger reason the poet cannot say what she wishes to say is that she wishes to say something that seems to be a kind of music, a word-field of music, as it's less a text and more a space of time profoundly charged by feeling, like the awe attendant to our modest place among the huge events of universal import: stars and novae, the initiating burst of Many from the One-"

K. Cherry from The Literary Review

Break Out in a Cry

from Chabad.org
There are things that are important to us, so we speak about them.

There are things so important to us that the words flow out in a burst of emotion, rich words, expressive and vibrant.

And then there are things that shake us to the core. Things that do not care for the mind's permission or for the right words—for the mind cannot fathom them, the most poignant words could not contain them. Things that can only break out in a cry, in a scream, and then in silence.

Immanence called Language

Everywhere-even deep in Lacan's "lettered unconscious", more dense
than a black hole in space-everywhere we encounter that immanence
called Language, with all it's literary ambiguities, epistemic
conundrums, and political distractions.

-Hassan

Communicating the Universe

"By Universe I mean the aggregate of all humanity's consciously
apprehended and communicated experiences. Wherefore I realized that all the words in all dictionaries are the consequent tools of all men's conscious and conscientious attempts to communicate all their experiences- which is of course to communicate
Universe."

Buckminster Fuller

The Articulation of What Is

Language might become a medium of ontological disclosure in which
things take on being through words and in postmodern thinking, truth
might transcend the merely pragmatic dimension; it might become the
loyal articulation, in language, of what is.....

-Palmer

Inflected with Biases

New Historicists in general share this modus operandi, insisting that every expressive act engages and participates in a system of material and ideological practices, that no neutral position is possible, that language itself is unavoidably inflected with particular biases and perspectives, that to express is not merely to represent, but to act, to change, and to distort.

artandculture.com

A little death sentence

Language is not life; it gives life orders. Life does not speak; it
listens and waits. Every order-word, even a father's to his son,
carries a little death sentence-a Judgement, as Kafka put it.

Deleuze

Made to obey

Language is not made to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel
obedience

Deleuze

Reality of Earth

Yes, happily language is a thing; it is a written thing, a bit of
bark, a sliver of rock, a fragment of clay in which the reality of the
earth continues to exist

Maurice Blanchot

Memories

to write things down is to externalize your memory where you don't have to remember everything, writing does it for you

Divorce

the minute you write something, you divorce from that which you wrote

Creating Reality

to change or create a word is to change or create reality

Imitations

Life imitates narrative and narrative imitates life

Circles

Language. It is a circle.

An Effect of Language

Whether it is said in one or many ways, being is something that is
said. It may well be the horizon of every. Other evidence, but it
becomes a philosophical problem only when we begin to talk about it,
and it is precisely our talking about it that makes it ambiguous and
polyvocal. The fact that this ambiguity can be reduced does not alter
the fact that we become aware of it only through speech. As it is
thinkable, being manifests itself to us right from the outself as an
effect of language"

Umberto Eco

Intimate Relations

Language is intimately a part of us, and also not a part of us at
all....

Bewitchment

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

A Wonderful Thing

Language is a wonderful thing. It can be used to express thoughts, to conceal thoughts, but more often, to replace thinking.

Dead Language

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
Stevenson

The Need to Complain

Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
Lilly Tomlin

Language of Painters

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to. . . . The feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.
Van Gogh

Solitude

“Language... has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone.”
Paul Tillich

Archive of History

“Language is the archives of history”

Two Languages

“I speak two languages, Body and English.”

Embodiment

A word, cannot exist outside of its embodiment

Never the Same

What words say does not last. The words last. Because words are always the same, and what they say is never the same. ~Antonio Porchia

Terrible Fear

The French, have a terrible fear of consonants

Viruses

A word is a virus....therefore you must butcher it, chop it up and render it meaningless

Versions of Certainty

dictionaries seek to define words with certainty and that is the way they relate to knowledge
no one dictionary can provide full certainty of a word across all contexts
any one dictionary is A dictionary not THE dictionary, it is a version always and already

Saturated with Time

words are saturated with time, we are saturated with words for we are temporal beings

Plasticity

there is a certain plasticity to words where they can mold to fit your world but other times, they don't bend the way you want them to

Synthesis

word: synthesis of body and concept

Ecology of All Ecologies

dictionary is a medium to life
words have a very strange relationship to one another
each word has its own internal law, its own internal ecology
dictionary is the ecology of all ecologies

Cosmos

if language performs, then a dictionary of all possible words is the cosmos

City of Words

Painted Fire

"words are painted fire; a look is the fire itself"

Architecture of The Invisible

There is the visible, concrete world. We label it with words and usually have little problems when it comes to translation across languages. But there is also another world, the invisible world, lined with its own architecture. These forms and relations we label with words but fail to translate. It is this world that is constructed by language.

Phenomenology of Narration

What space do you occupy when reading or telling a story?

Deconstruction

"Language works through us...the deconstruction is its impulse to look inside one text for another, dissolve one text into another, or build one text into another"

Linguistic Disorder

Lacan views schizophrenia as a linguistic disorder, a breakdown in the signifying chain of meaning in a narrative

An Ancient City

"Our language can be seen as an ancient city, a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses and of houses with additions from different periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses"
-Lyotard

Inverted Forms

"Lacan defines speech as a process in which the subjects get their meanings back from the Other in an inverted form. Think once more of what is involved in psychoanalytic interpretation. Here the meaning of a symptom is rendered by the analyst. What this means, for Lacan, is that the symptom not only bears upon the subject’s past relations to others. If it can be dissolved by an Other’s interpretation, this is because it is formed with an eye to this interpretation from the start"

Repressed Word

“The symptom arises where the world failed, where the circuit of symbolic communication was broken: it is a kind of “prolongation of communication by other means’”: the failed, repressed word articulates itself in a coded, ciphered form.

Slavoj Zizek

Expressing Deep Physical Laws

"Time is a subject subject and we are far from understanding it fully...the feeling that time flows is deeply ingrained in our experience and thoroughly pervades our thinking and language so much so, that we have lapsed and will continue to lapse, into habitual, colloquial descriptions that refer to a flowing time. But don't confuse language with reality. Human language is far better at capturing experience than at expressing deep physical laws"

-Brian Greene

Theory of Language

"Any philosophical system is, in the last analysis, a theory of language. Every inquiry about being calls into question the power of words"
-Albert Camus

No Exit

"Freedom is capacity to escape power, to subjugate no one. Then freedom can exist only outside of language. Unfortunately, human language has no exterior; there is no exist"

-Roland Barthes

Desires

"In appearance, speech may well be of little account, but prohibitions surrounding it soon reveal its links with desire and power. This should not be very surprising, for psychoanalysis has already shown us that speech is not merely the medium which manifests-or dissembles-desire; it is also the object of desire"
-Michel Foucault

Service of Power

"Once uttered, even in the subject's deepest privacy, speech enters the service of power...you are both the master and the slave of speech"
-Roland Barthes

Fascism

"Language, the performance of language system, is neither reactionary nor progressive. It is quite simply fascist, for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech"
-Roland Barthes

The Real

"From the ancient times...literature has been concerned to represent something. What? I will put it more crudely: the real. The real is not representable, and it is because men ceaselessly try to represent it by words that there is a history of literature"
-Roland Barthes

A Form of Life

"To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life"
Wittingstein

Reality is the Loser

"For Plato's Dialogues are nothing but long struggles between language and reality, in which paradoxically, reality is the loser"
-Camus

Failure to Find Words

"The history of philosophy...is basically a history of the failure of the mind, confronted with the problem of language. Man has not managed to find words"
-Camus

Being is Everything

"The truth of the word is not something it owns, but something which creates itself little by little in sentences, speeches, literature, and history of literatures...All words thus form part of an unending adventure that moves toward a universal meaning. At that point too language is being, because being is everything"
Camus

Terrible Inadequacy

"Language goes beyond individuals, and its terrible inadequacy is the sign of its transcendence"
Camus

A Metaphysical Question

"What is Parain's problem? He makes language a metaphysical question....for the problem is to know whether our most accurate expressions, our most successful cries are not in fact empty of all meaning, whether language does not, in short, express man׳s final solitude in a silent universe. What this adds up to is a search for essences of language, and a quest for words that can give us the same reasons we require of God. For Parain's basic premise is that if language is meaningless then everything is meaningless, and the world becomes absurd. We know only by means of words. If they are proved useless, then we are finally and irredeemably blinded" -Camus

Second Part of the Story

World of Thought

From chabad.org by Freeman


I suppose what really bothers me is this: Why did the Creator have to speak in order to create? Wouldn't it be so much more wonderful if we were all just a thought?

Actually, we are. That's how things started off. And that's what we connect into on the day of Shabbat.

You see, first there was a World of Thought. The written Torah doesn't start with that world. The Torah begins with a bet--the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It starts at the second part of the story. But at first there was a world that just emanated out of thought--and never left that place.

The second part of the story is when all those thoughts descended to become a concrete world. A place that seems separate from its Creator, outside of its source. Like speech: Your words travel outside of you and become part of someone else.

That's the world we live in for six days. A world that pretends to have no source. We try to push it around a little, it pushes us around a lot, and we both pretend that this is a real and autonomous world. That there is a world and there is us and we are all separate things.

But then, on the seventh day, the Creator let into this world a taste of that higher plane of the "World of Thought." We tune into it by no longer pushing anything around--or letting anything else push us around. We don't change anything. We don't create anything. We don't make fires, we don't cook food, we don't stink up the air with carbon monoxide or make cyberspace connections. We only meditate, contemplate and enjoy. We get a feel of a world that is no more than a single, vast, expressive and wondrous thought.

And then we return to the other six days. But we've already experienced this world's hidden truth. We can see through its facade. We can rip it away. We can draw that higher plane to illuminate our mundane world.

Voice of Seeing

"And so looking has force: it tears, it is sharp, it is an acid. In the end, it corrodes the object and the observer until they are lost in the field of vision. I once was solid, and now I am dissolved: that is the voice of seeing"

-James Elkins, on the nature of seeing

God's Utterances

"The book of nature is written in the language of math, whose symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word; without which one is a wanderer in vain through a dark labyrinth."
— Galileo Galilei

Constructing Reality

"The linguistic turn, therefore, is the eruption into human consciousness of the perspectival, contextual, and contingent nature of all truth claims. Language does not re-present reality, rather it shapes and constructs it, refracting the light of the world through its unique phonetic and conceptual prisms"

A Lost World

There is no deeper longing than the desire to regain the world lost to language.
Take me to a space where linguistic realities dissolve
To a time prior to their existence where the subject-object dichotomy evaporates
it gives rise to an amorphous reality that privileges relations as opposed to concepts.
A space where linguistic concepts bleed for they are inadequate to contain the multiplicity of the world and the walls they construct become
malleable and permeable.
Things blend with one another,
an amorphous state of existence that lacks rigid boundaries
A flux of networks, all infused with one another.
Deep nostalgia for this lost world.
Language kills the multiplicity of that which it defines with its imposed structure.
Through the acquisition of knowledge, we lose the experience of the world that can never be retrieved.
Learning a word strips us of the experience of the moment and imprisons us with its embrace.
This loss is a tragedy.

Fundamental Relationship

"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

Limits of My World

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”

Wittgenstein

Exquisite Horror of Reality

“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.”

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.

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

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"

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."

Echo of Infinity

"A silence is the echo of the infinity"
-Samuel Kessler :-)

Itches and Words

"You reach for a word as you reach for an itch" -Merleau-Ponty

it is that instinctual...

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."

Silence and Nothingness

"Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness"
-Samuel Beckett

I love your silences

"I love your silences. They are like mine"
-Anais Nin

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

Grammar of Silence

"There are grammatical errors even in his silence"
-Stanislaw Lec

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

Definitions & Infinity

*** rhetoric ten, *Coffeen

A word is all of its possible definitions

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.

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.....

Creationism

Creation of the world. The ultimate speech act.

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"

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.

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.