Shit Passes

On sunny days we chased the furniture around the room.
For God’s funeral, we donated food and scooped a contribution from the plate.
The bumper sticker provides us with a useful lesson.
When we found the lost child we gave it back.
Our neighbor keeps offering us the use of his tools.

We can’t help suspecting the last was at least as good as the next.
When they talked about our life, we knew it was our life, they used our names.

The Eggman Cometh

August 09

New Plot

Art Without Essence

Art without essence

Art abstracts; art supplements. These are the two operations of art.

They are the operations of language and all representation which has as its object that which lies outside the representation.

The question in any work of art: story, painting, poem, is What is it representing? What is it supplementing?

A photograph; a painting; a sculpture—whether or not its subject is “drawn from life.” The art takes into it self elements of the subject: color, texture, depth, appearance. The art supplements with what is not there: paint for cloth for example, marble for flesh, flatness for depth, ideality of expression (dealing with so called representational art); color for emotion (in so-called nonrepresentational art, which is symbolic (metaphoric or metonymic) but still representational if that word means anything).

Everything accurately captured by the art is represented; everything else is supplemented. In fact the difference is not simply categoric. The plaster is always utterly representational and supplemental depending on the point of seeing of the observer—artist and spectator equally are observers. Representation says Derrida always fails because presence itself always fails. But we are not representing things in themselves but ideas of things, taking things and our ideas about things and putting them together. So what we are representing is itself always a supplement. But there is still always ineluctably an element of representation. Our ideas and feelings about what we are representing are themselves being represented at the same time that they are supplements to the object. (How odd that we can use “subject” and “object” interchangeably here.)

When one posits essence, one can say it is the task of art to “capture the essence of the object.” What is not captured in this case, what is left out, is superfluous or otherwise inessential. We paint the president and project his essential commander-in-chiefness; we ignore his playfulness, his sense of humor. These are not his essence. We paint the nude. We display her essential sexuality, her essential humanity. We exclude her inessential pettiness etc.

When we no longer believe in essences we paint situationally, historically, in the moment, for the purpose, for what needs to be said now and to a given audience, ourselves, or viewers. “I want to understand the thing,” the nude body. But there is no understanding the thing in itself since nothing exists in itself.

What needs to be said now does not need to be said eternally, but only now. What needs to be said now will get us back, however, ineluctably, to essences. What is the need of now if not an essential need? We need to stop global warming, governmental corruption because survival is good, justice is good essentially. Or even if only useful, they are useful for an end declared as good.

No. We can declare these “goods” as provisional essences, predicates of “if” clauses: If we agree that global survival is good, then corruption and global warming should be kept in check. Survival is a provisional good for humans. Yet it is not certain we can abandon the notion of essence.

What about beauty? Aesthetics? Beauty entices us, crudely, the bikini in the tool ad, subtly, the colors in a Monet. We discover the beauty in an object through art. We bring out the beauty in an object; we supplement the object with beauty. The question is then whose interest does the beauty serve? The art object. Beauty has many functions. We send the bimbo to the gambler to distract him so we can steal his money. We send the Monet to the art collector—so we can steal his money in the form of payment. He buys a painting. He buys prestige, honor, position, envy in the form of a Monet. The whole socio-political structure stands.

Idle Runaway

Words and Meaning III

The analogy to time. Not long ago the world took exactly 24 hours to spin on its axis. The time it took to spin was always exactly, to the millisecond, 24 hours, not because the amount of time it took the world to spin was precisely equal every day (it has never been) because the day was defined by the spin and divided into 24 equal units of one hour. Variations were too minute for the technology of the day to perceive. The world spun on and on. Technology climbed steady up the hill of precision. A day came--we could name it, but I don't know its name--when the technology of the ruler exceeded the standard. There was a great divorce. Time became the standard by which the rotation of the earth was measured: the rotation no longer measured time. Slave became master then. The clock on which the ants live measured too erratically to be of use. Time measures only itself. It is without object or referrent--unless, at a moment, for a reason, someone chooses, temporarily, to give it one.

Words effected the same divorce, and at approximately the same time.

Merrimack, NH

What, when I return,
as I did today, to the place
where I was raised, am I—
knowing that I will never find it—
looking for?

And why,
as I move through charged space, marking
all that has changed, holding
out for something

recognizable,
am I reporting all I see
and all I miss
to you,
invisible beside me?

Nosing among new-named streets,
blank buildings whose histories confront me
with aimless urgency
old spots among the smear of the new:

the restaurant where I used to work,
the house of Nicky’s parents
with his name still on the mailbox,
the spot where Sandy,

on the day before we all left for college,
knowing she was the one in the world
I most wanted to love
leaned in at my window
and made an offering of goodbye, and

the place I last saw Kathy
before she died.

I know that here is where the text of whatever it is
I go back to read
must be read. But I don’t know why,

before I set my eyes on how little
of all I remember remains,
before I gave over the questions again,
I was already writing these words,
to you.

A System of Differences

"Language is a system of differences without positive terms." This is the first salvo in the closing off of the operation of language from reference--meaning. It almost works. Grammar requires that each word in a sentence have a function--a function in that sentence. It does require that any part of that sentence have a meaning, a referent, real or imaginary. It does not require that the sentence have any intent or function either of expression or of communication.

This matters, it seems to me, a lot and a little. A lot because language can be divorced absolutely from any of its assumed functions--conceived as as proper or ancillary; little because nonetheless this substance of neutral, naked, empty signifiers can be used for all of the functions for which it is used. We can, it seems to me, communicate and express by means of language most effectively. We can do this things outside of language, so called, as well--often better. The question must be turned around: it is not "what is language for? What does language do?" But rather "what do we do with language?" "What do we use it for?"

What becomes possible because we use it? (What do we use it for and nothing else?) What would be possible without it? What would not be possible without it? (Meaning could be created and conveyed, but how precisely?) Where are its borders? Where are its centers?

Why is all meaning metaphored in notions of carrying: metaphor, convey, communicate? But that's another matter.

Gardens Three

Borges Bakhtin and the OED

If Jorge and Mikhail had their way the OED would not merely cite every representative use of a word throughout history; it would cite every actual iteration, showing the differing nuances of meaning that emerge and accrue (or diminish or turn aside) a necessary correlate of the absolute uniqueness, the unrepeatability, of every moment. It would also there cite every quotation of every iteration, every undergraduate's particular reading and reciting of Hamlet, excluding only misuses, misunderstandings and misreadings but including the use of every word in a definition in the OED.

If you add Derrida to the dictionary you'd have to include in the already infinite book every misreadings and every misspeaking as well.

Words and Meaning II

The Impossibility of the Dictionary

A Spade a Spade
My Kingdom for a Spade

Arise My Love, Arise My Love:
Apollo's Lighting the Skies My Love

A Rose by Any Other Name
Still Would Not Be a Rose

Gentlemen: Choose Your Title

Here is the danger of the notion that words have meaning: It is the danger of believing that things as such exist. "Why don't you call it by its name?" Because it doesn't have one. It is not a question of the abitrary nature of the signifier merely. It is the "arbitrary" (in de Saussure's sense, which is only tentatively related to what is generally capable of supporting the name "arbitrary") "nature" "of" "the" "signified" (all words require quotation marks, which, for sheer convience, will, from this word forth, be invisible, mostly). A horse, a chair, a word, a duck: "things" "[that]" "exist" but not as horses or chairs or words or ducks. They are all existants momentarily snapshot-frozen into a form which we, running along beside them in the restless race of time, accidentally perceive as namable. Poor Adam; his very first test could not be passed. Was it not for naming the animals that he lost paradise? "Species" change--we could use the name "grow" here--from one "thing" to another. We call it evolution when we take a wider-angle shot and put our series of frozen snapshots in filmic sequence. It was a dinosaur, now it is a bird; who knows what it will be when if finally matures, which it will never do. Think of the butterfly who starts a journey from Mexico, arriving generations later, in Canada, returning, generations later, to Mexico.

Evening and Morning, the First Day.

Still Life

Cut oranges glasses galoshes
big fruit bowls of
apples onions autumn
leaves broken
sticks

circle
of dog ears miniature cattle
dead ducks limp bodies
frozen setter
eyes ablaze
lolling tongue
water glaze

life still
waiting a clock
paused a man a
house a yard a street a
lamp a job a wife a
sleep a life

still a
planet spun still
cold planets colder
stars dark space black
holes still a
trace a
lack

A, the novel, at Red Hen

"We Have Another Vocabulary For That"

A comment today on NPR regarding the "war" on terror--that it could have been framed as a legal action, "Let's bring these criminals to justice" rather than a war. Problem with the war metaphor: you can't wage a war against a strategy.

We have another vocabulary: that of law, in which the victory is merely justice, which like heaven, is another rendition of the vocabulary of economics. Law, religion and money deploy the same structure through different vocaularies.

We have a different vocabulary means, really, we have a different structure through which to think it, since it lacks an inherent structure. We have a different vocabulary. We do not, however, have enough vocabularies, enough structures. If several structures are, essentially, the same, despite a variety of vocabularies, what a writer can bring to the mix is not a new vocaulary, but a novel structure. Neither war nor gold.

Book Lovers

We crawl under the covers
of a book,
lie
between the lines,
make love,
smoke the words.

It’s all very dangerous.
It’s not even our book.
Anyone could peek between
the sheets, follow to our hiding place
the ashes
smeared by our bare feet
across the pages.

Careless, we laugh our footprints
along the ridge and loosen the spine,
we pore over fields of text, page
on page, rolling in the leaves,
setting each sentiment,
each groping groping sentence,
ablaze.

Thinking Without Words

I'm trying to think like a chimp, without the hope of words. What happens?

First, I must acknoweldge that I can't. I can't erase all words from my thinking. I can imagine a scene, a photo, a person, but I cannot strip from my scene all sense of language--language understood as verbal. I can walk the paths of my garden; I can pass through the break in the stone wall and enter the woods, but my flowers and my trees have their names carved on them, and my movements are described in terms.

Second I perceive that everything available to a pre-verbal primate is still available to me, under the words. The pictures are vivid. I could find my way through the paths by various signs that are not verbal if I did not have words. I could feel the longing for the warm sunny spot where I enjoyed my morning. And I could find it without words. Would I be thinking in pictures: Yes, but not syntactically. And not only in pictures, because I have more than eyes. I have encoded the the path in odors. As long as I feel the urge of desire to find the sunny spot of long grass, I don't have to remember why I am moving in this direction. I am saying "yes" or "no" at every step, at every stump, at every smell. I may have encoded this memory a year ago and never thought of it since, and I my memory may be more clouded than I realize. But I say, without words, without "saying" "here" and "not hear." I feel the corresponding rightness when I see the mark on the path; it is a sign because it conjures the nod of feeling.

I don't know "tree" and I don't know "stone" and I don't know "cold" or "muddy" as words. But I nonetheless have them as concepts. I know all these tall hard grey musties are the same. I even know some are more suitable for climbing, more comfortable for sitting, for finding food in. I know the path to the wamn sunny grasses passes a stone like this and a tree like that.

Thus I survive without words, via memories coded in feelings evoked through sudden associations. I don't know because I cannot conjure at will, when I am not beside the termites that I can strip a branch and drop it in the hole and pull it out full of food. But I know when I am there. And in my dreams I repeat, I code, my branch and my termites and, lying between my warm mate and my warm child, my warm sunny spot in the tall grass.

Words and Meaning I

What is the best analogy for the relationship between a word and its meaning? Perhaps it is the analogy of money to its value.

The Wet Log

Too much depends
upon

A wet log
that won’t burn

In the middle
of the fire.

Shit.

In the Eye of the Heron

In the eye of the heron
on the bridgerail so close to the car
we could almost disturb with our hands his circle
of awareness we are
an object
gliding harmlessly past

He wafts to the stream
where we soak in the ice of the mountain
And I stare at the eye not staring at me
And he sees
nothing—
a scrap of motion

Dead, he seems to me.
Dead in his eye,
a machine—

neither food nor threat
we do not exist
for this unflappable bird.

grey on the edge of all this commotion
grey on the rocks beside the black trees
close almost close enough
to touch
shadow enough to be
invisible

finds nothing, launches
his great grey bulk, shark of the air—why should he seem so graceful—his
enormous wings, silent as his eye, raise him
above, just above, our heads, and carry him, a line
drawn down the center of the stream, around
the corner
out of sight
of the dozens floating, dozens splashing,
one woman bent forward on strong stalks
washing her long blonde hair.