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Tuesday, 21 February 2006
Lice and men.
Hail rattles the windows high above the street. There is something about the present tense that allows an air of pretension, requires an air of pretension. Story telling requires a past tense, because an ending, a resolution is necessitated. The present tense does not allow to know what happens next, or that there is a next.
Finally gaining an aspect on things today, work towards the AV festival is running itself into the ground and falling over itself but I know where to fin it and where it will lie. Scurried across town today, stooping and sheltering from the icy downpours. Tonight is a bleak one, as you know. The importance of it all. What needs to be done. Which approaches will prove fruitless and which will lead to other, fecund paths?
Two sorts of blackness approach; the first is a furious dark, a rage of definites and possibilities, a myriad of plannings and happenings. The second is a dark of nothing, the shock of a non-sequitur, a hushed what-happens-next. So much of myself is focussed upon the immediate future and the events of next weekend, so many of my (limited) faculties are honed to trying to predict its exact nature that I am born again into nothing when it finishes.
To finish these events, to actual complete the reality of what-happened, is tantamount to the removal of an icon, the removal of a pretence toward the heavens. It mediates for redemption through representation, and ideas that this is something, this is nothing. What it only reveals however, is that this is my autonomy and my line to the stars. After that, all is just a near-silent fading and the fresh spread of unmade plans.
19:50 Posted in Confessional | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Monday, 20 February 2006
If this occurs.
I don't know why.
I don't know what it means.
It is just there. But only sometimes.
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Sorry for this HTML intrusion, especially if it obstructs your reading. I want it to go away
22:35 Posted in Sonic | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Absence in literature
Immediately to the blank canvas while he, unbroken by language, borrows books. Things flood at the minute. Dams built within time, constraints of time, walls of time, making spaces for this and that, for all. Breached daily, we subside and gather, swell and resist. We paper the crack and plaster the fissures, avoiding disaster with each hastily scribbled appointment, note, list.
Ah, the lists. The endless nothing of things, the lists and lists – even the lists of lists! To keep track of my daily obligations I write at least fifteen lists a day, not as distraction you understand, but a necessary organisation. But then you need the lists to keep track of the lists. Enumeration breeds contempt…
Lecture was slow and burdened. A basic misunderstanding – that, namely, the purpose of literary criticism is not to inscribe an inherent of value upon a text, nor to realise its merits or sustainability, Rather, the role of the critic should be as enabler. So, when we arrive at World Literature (a capital concept) we are stung.
The cry in the classes, penned into their tiny chairs and single desks, unable to conference or permit. They hear of the world and wish to speak of their culture. In my culture, they say, this is not how we do things. You in the West, they accuse (a capital venture as well as a capital concept, no?), you in the West undermine with your authority. You think that you are the best at everything.
What does best have to do with anything? We are not administrators of taste! We are not financed by opinion and attitude! These things to not sit easy within us, they do not rest for us, who are called literary scholars or literary critics. To look at literature with regards to the world is not to state preference or dominance. It is to recognise absence.
By drawing another text into one’s culture, in encountering work from another sphere is a positive, constructive process. In regarding something truly different, we recognise its absence from our own society. The absence is a void which we readily recognise, but also a void which we readily fill.
If there is not the direct translation, if we are unable to find an equivalent, then we must reconstruct that concept, fill that void with an immediacy, with something to hand from our own culture. In doing so, we realise the formulations of our society and our history. We observe the forked paths of progress and we notice the substitutions and adaptations that progression bring. We notice what is missing, but more importantly we understand how it is missing, we understand the purpose of it’s nothingness, for absence is positive and a mirror.
22:33 Posted in Literary | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Saturday, 18 February 2006
Illiterated
I head straight to the pharmaceuticals, pull the door off its hinges, a craze of need. I desire it, I want Echinacea Tincture, slow release Vitamin C, extracts of grape, raspberry puree, New Zealand honey, a sliced lemon, the round steam of Heinz soup rising from the bowl into my nostrils.
How is any one able to find time? I cannot keep it, even when it is given to me.
Today, was my rest, my respite, my despite-all, my time to myself. Of course, yesterday during work I fell ill with the usual symptoms, that heady dreamy distance and of course the sensitivity of my skin, as though a thousand needles were pushing out from underneath.
I had consultations to attend late yesterday evening, urgencies to arrest, but while the others were away from the desks I quickly and silently shut down my computer, packed my bag, and left. Demands were unkept, arrangements unmade at that instant. I made a physical absence of myself, a wordless abstinence from my dull, paper-pushing obligations.
This is not to say that I don’t like my work. I can say that it lives inside me. I race down the hill each morning to grasp my new challenges by the stem. I work and work and work, and then I talk and worry and then I work. Two weeks yesterday, it all begins – present past future tense
The wheels will turn, motionless paradoxes as the date is set in my mind, in all of our minds. A deadline is a dead line. It does not move any longer. Cross it and you will perish.
The details of time escape from me though, in unravelling myself from those meetings – an un-implication that seemed as natural as light’s fall – I shunted my weekend against itself. I slept from nine in the evening to nine in the morning. The body’s way of letting go, easing myself into recuperation from an illness I pre-empted.
The true symptoms did not become manifest, I held their development at ransom, over-indulged in every rich, warm foodstuff I could lay my hands on. I pummelled my sore throat throat and battered my weary eyes, nearly gauging them out just to be able to see. This cannot happen, I mumbled over and over, a sick shaman. I appeal to whoever, I just don’t have time for this.
But time is here now, and this is perhaps the first time in days or weeks to sit and write. Buoyed by an illness, a preventative incarceration, I ignore tonight, where there is music being played in the old tower and entertainments being held in the bars and restaurants.
Instead I cram tablets into my mouth and end it here.
19:20 Posted in Confessional | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Wednesday, 15 February 2006
Anatomy Of Interpretation II
The previous post began with the present, establishing a conflict between Hebraism and Hellenism that caused the present to exist in permanent variance and oscillation between the two ideals. The post also ended with the present, and a hope for emancipation through interpretation.
Vassilis Lambropoulos however moves the argument on, stating that this present never happened. The constant flux between the spiritual goal of the past (Hellenism) and the reason-based future (Hebraism) represents the tensions and contradictions between attempting to achieve spirituality (Hellenic) through reason (Hebraic).
Hellenic autonomy has therefore come to be ruled by Hebraic reason, and has come to represent, and be represented by, disinterested contemplations of purposeless beauty, it has come to be known as the science of aesthetic – the internalised rule of autonomy. VL identifies manners, taste and style as forms of aesthetic conduct, what is essentially a question of attitude.
VL plays back through history and extracts the development of interpretation in relation to modernity. He talks of the governing States of the 19th Century and their specific evolution. Art in this social context was a tool for distinction; it was a method in which one was able to form part of an elite. However, for the masses, this canon lost all public relevance, and yet retained the discipline of interpretation.
The late 20th Century sees postmodernism occur as a desperate effort to preserve the authority of the text. Aesthetic conduct comes into play as an all-encompassing textualisation which consumes all and attempts to convert everything into ‘influence’ and ultimately, writing. Interpretation therefore for VL, resides purely within the intellectual domain. Interpretation emerged as the first political right of the middle classes which begat spiritual freedom.
Now, the only emancipation allowed by interpretation is that which it allows from itself – that is to say, from any political or social importance or relevance. Interpretation has abandoned its public role, denounced its public accountability and embraced theological politics. Hence, VL charts the demise of interpretation, and establishes a basis for an argument for restoration of the sociological movement of autonomy and a redefinition of cultural politics.
23:35 Posted in Literary | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Tuesday, 14 February 2006
Anatomy Of Interpretation I
Continuing in my somewhat sporadic vein of posting, this has all bulk and no sulk. Nil lamenting, no abstract postulating, just some plain old plagiarism and summary for the benefit of my tired
Investigating Vassilis Lambropoulos’ Anatomy Of Intepretation this week. Lambropoulos distinguishes between Hellenic and Hebraic modes of thought. Hellenism belongs to the past, and implicates society in its pursuit of art and spirit. Hebraism on the other hand pertains to the future, to modes of reason and morality. Western civilisation, that is to say Europe and its eurocentrisms, are caught between a Hellenic past and a Hebraic future. The explanation of this relationship forms the basis for the argument and the narrative of his book.
A historical reassessment is undertaken by VL in order to understand the stasis that the West finds itself in. He cites the schism of the Christian church in 1054 as the point from which Europe began to pursue the expression of form, that is to say, the illumination of matter and the arrest of time.
VL divides ‘matter’ into the worldly (material) and the spiritual (form). The Protestant church preferred the worldly, rejecting the dogma, hierarchy & highness of the Catholic church. To compensate, it found that it needed to anchor itself in something other than recurring ritual; it found solace and purpose in ‘form’, the spiritual happening of matter.
‘Form’ itself is a type of redemption, a redemption brought about through representation – that is the extraction of the worldly to the spiritual. Word, for VL, is the vehicle for representation and so language takes upon a crucial role. This becomes the new ritual, a secular ritual of verbal communication, a community of forms in which everyone is able to express and be expressed.
A prerequisite of this is faith in ‘form’, which involves a necessary rejection of both scholastic exegesis (taught critical/explanatory interpretation) or nominalist scepticism. Nominalism should be read here as the idea that a variety of objects to which a single general word (cat for instance) applies have nothing in common but the name, and the scepticism arises from nominalism implication that language bears no direct relevance to the object it describes, there is no relationship between the world and the word.
This faith in form lead the Protestant reformists to take the text as the pre-eminent type of ‘form’, because it’s basis is in language – the text represents the most eloquent example of secular communion. As a result of the elevation of text, a new mode of understanding is created to help penetrate it: interpretation.
The discipline of communion holds an inherent promise of freedom; interpretation allows an autonomous mode of communication. This spiritual liberation (from all forms of worldly authority) allows an unrestrained relationship with form and vice versa, and hence, for the religious, enabled the Kingdom of God on earth. This moment, for VL, inaugurates modernity and signals Christianity’s abandoning of notions of eternal time and an infinitely sited redemption in exchange for a pledged, personally accessible and autonomous present.
15:05 Posted in Literary | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Wednesday, 08 February 2006
Modern relevance.
I write this now, while I have the chance. I write to confirm and destroy, a summary and an execution. An execution and a resolution.
Winter winds tear me as I sleep these nights, ripped apart by dreams of obligation and inference. I have things to do, these future occupations inhabit my evenings, I work the day through before it happens.
I complain too much about this.
No writing for a while, building up as I am towards a career and an education – falsities of both flit upon the widening horizon, the yawn of a passed sundown.
Lectures on Monday and Wednesday – I hope I write to you more than this – but they improve and grow in stature as the year diminishes. A theoretical fulcrum helps, a point of knowledge on which to balance fictions.
Criticism this evening caused the book to flower. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple started slowly, a recontextualising in bold, steady occurrance, and the progression of the book beginning from a point in history that I did not entirely understand. To view beginnings though, that is to say to create beginnings, we must first be aware of a movement.
Movements are all around, necessarily. They are constant and in flux and must be written before they are to be noticed. So where is my movement, what is my relevance, where in the world am I? The nuances of my situation – do they require writing about?
No.
22:23 Posted in Literary | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this