bite this answer in half
there are times when something will open a door within you. we explain this by saying it happened at "the right time", as though if it had happened at any other time that door would not have opened.
this is probably true.
but what if the something created the door in the first place? what if instead of being a catalyst, it is the fact itself? and at every juncture of possibility in our life the door would have been different.
i'm thinking of this because of an essay by anne carson, variations on the right to remain silent, which talks about the silences in language, and translation, and about joan of arc, and about francis bacon. these are all relevant to my interests. language and joan of arc are long-held fascinations, but bacon is relatively new. and even newer is having seen, just two weeks ago, the exhibition at the art gallery of new south wales of his retrospective.
so there is joan of arc's "The light comes in the name of the voice"; hölderlin's "Often enough I tried language, often enough I tried song, but they didn't hear you."; and bacon's "the scream not the horror". then, just today, in peter carey's the chemistry of tears, i found, "Illud aspicis non vides" (You cannot see what you can see). the catastrophising of the cliché.
carson talks about the places where language is untranslatable, where a word or a sentence "stops itself". it's been a long time since i read blanchot, but there are echoes here, i think. something analogous to his theories about death and the impossibility of dying. in his view that the state of being, the verb tense, is what creates the possibility in the first place.
at the end of the essay, she writes, I was trained to strive for exactness and to believe that rigorous knowledge of the world without any residue is possible for us. This residue, which does not exist-just to think of it refreshes me. To think of its position, how it shares its position with drenched layers of nothing, to think of its motion, how it can never stop moving because I am in motion with it, to think of its tone of voice, which is casual (in fact it forgets my existence almost immediately) but every so often betrays a sort of raw pity I don't understand, to think of its shadow, which is cast by nothing and so has no death in it (or very little)-to think of these things is like a crack of light showing under the door of a room where I've been locked for years.
this is the room in which i am standing. here is the door. has it always existed?
--
This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth. If you feel inclined, comment there.
this is probably true.
but what if the something created the door in the first place? what if instead of being a catalyst, it is the fact itself? and at every juncture of possibility in our life the door would have been different.
i'm thinking of this because of an essay by anne carson, variations on the right to remain silent, which talks about the silences in language, and translation, and about joan of arc, and about francis bacon. these are all relevant to my interests. language and joan of arc are long-held fascinations, but bacon is relatively new. and even newer is having seen, just two weeks ago, the exhibition at the art gallery of new south wales of his retrospective.
so there is joan of arc's "The light comes in the name of the voice"; hölderlin's "Often enough I tried language, often enough I tried song, but they didn't hear you."; and bacon's "the scream not the horror". then, just today, in peter carey's the chemistry of tears, i found, "Illud aspicis non vides" (You cannot see what you can see). the catastrophising of the cliché.
carson talks about the places where language is untranslatable, where a word or a sentence "stops itself". it's been a long time since i read blanchot, but there are echoes here, i think. something analogous to his theories about death and the impossibility of dying. in his view that the state of being, the verb tense, is what creates the possibility in the first place.
at the end of the essay, she writes, I was trained to strive for exactness and to believe that rigorous knowledge of the world without any residue is possible for us. This residue, which does not exist-just to think of it refreshes me. To think of its position, how it shares its position with drenched layers of nothing, to think of its motion, how it can never stop moving because I am in motion with it, to think of its tone of voice, which is casual (in fact it forgets my existence almost immediately) but every so often betrays a sort of raw pity I don't understand, to think of its shadow, which is cast by nothing and so has no death in it (or very little)-to think of these things is like a crack of light showing under the door of a room where I've been locked for years.
this is the room in which i am standing. here is the door. has it always existed?
--
This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth. If you feel inclined, comment there.