Addressing Rhythm

A passage in a review at intercapillary space suggests reading Lisa Robertson The Men besides Djuna Barnes The Book of Repulsive Women. Edmund Hardy writes

"A man is another person - a woman is yourself," as Nora observes in Nightwood. Barnes subtitled her first book "8 Rhythms and 5 Drawings", & Robertson's books could also perhaps be called rhythms: each one has a different rhythmic texture, or syllabic knobbling.

From early on in The Men (the last two lines to the opening "rhythm")

Young men of sheepish privilege becoming
Sweet new style

From late in The Book of Repulsive Women

Until her songless soul admits
      Time comes to kill:
You pay her price and wonder why
      You need her still.

It is Nora's observation as reported by Edmund that here plays in my little sandbox of quotation, serving as a cypher, gliding through the genders of the the game of identification and projection. And precisely because it is mapped onto the polarities of man and woman only contingently (the polarities can be reversed) the rather unmarked place of the interlocutor becomes a complex question not only of gender but also of singleness versus plurality. A you can be two or more. And how then does the configuration of the interlocutor affect the rhythm?

And so for day 336
15.11.2007