Contact / Contacts on Lovers, Poets, and Friends
As always we are indebted to Brother Barthes:
"Accidentaly, Werther's finger touches Charlotte's, their feet, under the table, happen to brush against each other. Werther might be engrossed by the meaning of these accidents; he might concentrate physically on these slight zones of contact and delight in this fragment of inert finger or foot, fetishistically, without concern for response (like God -- as the etymology of the word tells us -- the Fetish does not reply). But in fact Werther is not perverse, he is in love: he creats meaning, always and everywhere, out of nothing, and it is meaning which thrills him: he is in the crucible of meaning. Every contact, for the lover, reaises the question of an answer: the skin is asked to reply.
(A squeeze of the hand -- enormous documentation -- a tiny gesture within the palm, a knee which doesn't move away, and arm extended, as if quite naturally, along the back of a sofa and against which the other's head gradually comes to rest -- this is the paradisiac realm of subtle and clandestine signs: a kind of festival not of the senses but of meaning.)"
-From Roland Barthes A Lover's Discourse
Barthes here is talking about Physical contact within the context of a love affair, of course, which I find strangely and profoundly beautiful here in the idea of the lovers creating meaning out of small clandestine contacts and signs, but also of love as the state of looking to create these types of meaning.
Ive been thinking this is somehow meaningful, though in terms of writing poetry. The poet, like a lover, seeks to seduce to a great degree, greater meanings and constructions through small subtle contacts and signs. The difference, of course, is the poet and the reader are not lovers, the seduction is one way, and the poet remains blind to communication the other way.
They engage with an Other whose response they can only guess at. Thus I think a poet has to be more brazen than a lover, as there is no luxury of waiting for that response, that head on the shoulder, the knee that doesn't move away. Or to take it further, the poet has to provide this within the poem itself, in small places where the reader is forced to become, whether they like it or not, complicit in creation of metaphor and meaning.
And of course, there is a similarity to discourse online (or even talking on the telephone), which bereft of the physical signs and body language we are accustomed to, some would say biologically wired for, we have to replace this by a shared construction of meaning from subtleties.... and there is always a point where one does go looking for meaning, and in that mutual creation, become somehow complicit.
I've been a bit taken by this passage, as you might see, the idea of small communications, and this mutual conspiracy of meanings seems resonant and vibrant. Trying to write something on it today...
More for later,
Selah
"Accidentaly, Werther's finger touches Charlotte's, their feet, under the table, happen to brush against each other. Werther might be engrossed by the meaning of these accidents; he might concentrate physically on these slight zones of contact and delight in this fragment of inert finger or foot, fetishistically, without concern for response (like God -- as the etymology of the word tells us -- the Fetish does not reply). But in fact Werther is not perverse, he is in love: he creats meaning, always and everywhere, out of nothing, and it is meaning which thrills him: he is in the crucible of meaning. Every contact, for the lover, reaises the question of an answer: the skin is asked to reply.
(A squeeze of the hand -- enormous documentation -- a tiny gesture within the palm, a knee which doesn't move away, and arm extended, as if quite naturally, along the back of a sofa and against which the other's head gradually comes to rest -- this is the paradisiac realm of subtle and clandestine signs: a kind of festival not of the senses but of meaning.)"
-From Roland Barthes A Lover's Discourse
Barthes here is talking about Physical contact within the context of a love affair, of course, which I find strangely and profoundly beautiful here in the idea of the lovers creating meaning out of small clandestine contacts and signs, but also of love as the state of looking to create these types of meaning.
Ive been thinking this is somehow meaningful, though in terms of writing poetry. The poet, like a lover, seeks to seduce to a great degree, greater meanings and constructions through small subtle contacts and signs. The difference, of course, is the poet and the reader are not lovers, the seduction is one way, and the poet remains blind to communication the other way.
They engage with an Other whose response they can only guess at. Thus I think a poet has to be more brazen than a lover, as there is no luxury of waiting for that response, that head on the shoulder, the knee that doesn't move away. Or to take it further, the poet has to provide this within the poem itself, in small places where the reader is forced to become, whether they like it or not, complicit in creation of metaphor and meaning.
And of course, there is a similarity to discourse online (or even talking on the telephone), which bereft of the physical signs and body language we are accustomed to, some would say biologically wired for, we have to replace this by a shared construction of meaning from subtleties.... and there is always a point where one does go looking for meaning, and in that mutual creation, become somehow complicit.
I've been a bit taken by this passage, as you might see, the idea of small communications, and this mutual conspiracy of meanings seems resonant and vibrant. Trying to write something on it today...
More for later,
Selah