another hello
So I'm just going to remind you all that I am trying to do NaBloPoMo over at blog@eriktrips and to let you know that I restored the important parts of the three lost posts. Lost anyone's comments though. Cannot do anything about that.
Since I have pretty much made it into a poetry blog and since I am in the middle of experimenting with abstraction in poetry the things I have been posting run from text files to scanned-in drawings, and it is only the 10th. I have no idea what else I will post. Everyday I think of something slightly different and I have yet to hit upon the thing that feels the most like writing something without writing anything.
I suspect that this sort of writing, like appearance that is not the appearance of a particular thing or like any other event since these are events and not things, cannot be expressed within writing of any kind or make an appearance on the page because it is more akin to the act of putting a thing on a page but it is not "an act" either in that it is not something that can be recuperated with a simple noun like "act." Or "event." These are shorthand and point elsewhere than their usual referents. The writing I am thinking of is an infinite repetition of discrete occurrences that are neither particular nor generic but sort of both in a way.
But so it is leading me into abstraction because writing in this sense is at least not connected strongly with language although it may be indistinguishable with the unconscious of language or language's primary process or the event of speaking. It may seem that one could say that all of these practices-writing, speaking, appearing-occur as the result of some event that repeats itself except that it does not repeat itself but begins again over and over and over even if only very slightly different from the last event of appearance or writing or speaking.
At least, this is how I want it to be. I will freely admit to a prejudice against anything that tends toward monotheism, which lurks as a consequence of proposing a transcendent event that is separate from the particular. but I want these events to occur as neither particular events nor as a universal event but as singularities and of course this is Deleuze speaking more than anyone else but it is important to me to reemphasize that there is no such thing as repetition. The same, but just a little different. That's Gershom Scholem as quoted by Giorgio Agamben but first you heard Gertrude Stein.
I am beginning to feel as if I should be posting this over there. Perhaps I will. but I will leave off the part where I tell you about my day:
I have been keeping extremely odd hours lately. I go from 36-hour days in which I stay up for close to 24 hours and sleep for close to 12 to five-hour days punctuated by four-hour naps such that I go through several days in a short period. Maybe it all evens out. It is possible that staying up for 24 hours leaves me fatigued even after a 12-hour nap so that after a couple of cycles of that I tend to start living in mini-days for a couple of calendar days until I get rested up and stay awake for 24 hours again.
I like it. It's of the sort of ordered chaos in which I prefer to live in most ways. I have to have the security of being able to nap whenever I need to, but I also need the freedom to completely ignore cultural mandates as to when days begin and end. Why should I get up at the same time every day? My body clock always rebels against that, either keeping me up late into the night or getting me up very early in the morning or both. I prefer dawn and dusk to what lies between them which is typical of me: since in sunrise and sunset cycles a very predictable display of unpredictable transitoriness. No two sunsets are ever the same.
I would even go so far as to say that two people cannot watch the same sunset even if the degree of difference between them is miniscule. This is not to say that there is no such thing as an "objective" sun but it is highly sceptical of a claim to be able to know anything about something like that. The empirical as such can be predictable to an extent-but always only to an extent, even if it is a very large one-but it does not follow that objectivity is experienced in the empirical. The empirical is a particular kind of experience but it would take a book (at least) to explain what kind of experience it was. One could almost say that the subjective and objective meet in the empirical except that one cannot say that at all because once subjectivity and objectivity meet we lose the categorical "exactititude" we thought we had a handle on and can no longer speak of subjectivity and objectivity. Which is also kind of like saying that the empirical is haunted by an unspeakability that tends to break it up and make it entirely unknowable and yet overflowing with potential knowledge. Which is something like what is divine even in empirical experience but it is not a Being named "God."
And that only covers how we speak in Western culture, or in parts of Western culture, or within some values for "Western culture."
So I seem to be feeling abstract this morning. Apologies if it didn't seem to make sense. It is time now to have a bowl of cereal and consider what to do with the time I have before sunset and any time I might have leftover afterwards. Hope everyone is doing ok. I've been reading LJ from most recent to least recent and so I think I skip recurring chunks of ever-receding not-quite-recent-enough posts so if there was something you hoped I would read, leave a link. Seriously. I'll go read it if you ask me to.
Since I have pretty much made it into a poetry blog and since I am in the middle of experimenting with abstraction in poetry the things I have been posting run from text files to scanned-in drawings, and it is only the 10th. I have no idea what else I will post. Everyday I think of something slightly different and I have yet to hit upon the thing that feels the most like writing something without writing anything.
I suspect that this sort of writing, like appearance that is not the appearance of a particular thing or like any other event since these are events and not things, cannot be expressed within writing of any kind or make an appearance on the page because it is more akin to the act of putting a thing on a page but it is not "an act" either in that it is not something that can be recuperated with a simple noun like "act." Or "event." These are shorthand and point elsewhere than their usual referents. The writing I am thinking of is an infinite repetition of discrete occurrences that are neither particular nor generic but sort of both in a way.
But so it is leading me into abstraction because writing in this sense is at least not connected strongly with language although it may be indistinguishable with the unconscious of language or language's primary process or the event of speaking. It may seem that one could say that all of these practices-writing, speaking, appearing-occur as the result of some event that repeats itself except that it does not repeat itself but begins again over and over and over even if only very slightly different from the last event of appearance or writing or speaking.
At least, this is how I want it to be. I will freely admit to a prejudice against anything that tends toward monotheism, which lurks as a consequence of proposing a transcendent event that is separate from the particular. but I want these events to occur as neither particular events nor as a universal event but as singularities and of course this is Deleuze speaking more than anyone else but it is important to me to reemphasize that there is no such thing as repetition. The same, but just a little different. That's Gershom Scholem as quoted by Giorgio Agamben but first you heard Gertrude Stein.
I am beginning to feel as if I should be posting this over there. Perhaps I will. but I will leave off the part where I tell you about my day:
I have been keeping extremely odd hours lately. I go from 36-hour days in which I stay up for close to 24 hours and sleep for close to 12 to five-hour days punctuated by four-hour naps such that I go through several days in a short period. Maybe it all evens out. It is possible that staying up for 24 hours leaves me fatigued even after a 12-hour nap so that after a couple of cycles of that I tend to start living in mini-days for a couple of calendar days until I get rested up and stay awake for 24 hours again.
I like it. It's of the sort of ordered chaos in which I prefer to live in most ways. I have to have the security of being able to nap whenever I need to, but I also need the freedom to completely ignore cultural mandates as to when days begin and end. Why should I get up at the same time every day? My body clock always rebels against that, either keeping me up late into the night or getting me up very early in the morning or both. I prefer dawn and dusk to what lies between them which is typical of me: since in sunrise and sunset cycles a very predictable display of unpredictable transitoriness. No two sunsets are ever the same.
I would even go so far as to say that two people cannot watch the same sunset even if the degree of difference between them is miniscule. This is not to say that there is no such thing as an "objective" sun but it is highly sceptical of a claim to be able to know anything about something like that. The empirical as such can be predictable to an extent-but always only to an extent, even if it is a very large one-but it does not follow that objectivity is experienced in the empirical. The empirical is a particular kind of experience but it would take a book (at least) to explain what kind of experience it was. One could almost say that the subjective and objective meet in the empirical except that one cannot say that at all because once subjectivity and objectivity meet we lose the categorical "exactititude" we thought we had a handle on and can no longer speak of subjectivity and objectivity. Which is also kind of like saying that the empirical is haunted by an unspeakability that tends to break it up and make it entirely unknowable and yet overflowing with potential knowledge. Which is something like what is divine even in empirical experience but it is not a Being named "God."
And that only covers how we speak in Western culture, or in parts of Western culture, or within some values for "Western culture."
So I seem to be feeling abstract this morning. Apologies if it didn't seem to make sense. It is time now to have a bowl of cereal and consider what to do with the time I have before sunset and any time I might have leftover afterwards. Hope everyone is doing ok. I've been reading LJ from most recent to least recent and so I think I skip recurring chunks of ever-receding not-quite-recent-enough posts so if there was something you hoped I would read, leave a link. Seriously. I'll go read it if you ask me to.