Cartographic Epithets

There is a wonderful set of epithets that one encounters in reading an essay by John Koethe (poet and philosopher) found in the collection Poetry at One Remove. Here they are lifted out of context — with a slight misquotation:

islets of memory and estuaries of desire

These are placed in parallel to "thoughts" and "feelings". And for you to judge how they sharpen the figure offered for the relation between subject and representation, here is the complete sentence:

The experience of the condition of extremity of the perspectival subject, then, is one of the dissipation of this sense of the private character of experience and of a correlative expansion of the sense of the possibility of a completely objective version of the world, which would locate "our" thoughts and feelings, inlets of memory, and estuaries of desire unproblematically on a map of the world and still leave no aspect uncharted.

I find the shift from "inlets" to "islets" telling as to how I regard the relation between thoughts and feelings. Koethe would use the water metaphor throughout and I long for a harbour.

One of us is more prepared to inhabit the sublime longer. Do see the collection for some further remarks about poetry, subjectivity and the sublime.

And so for day 828
20.03.2009