Narrativity and the Open

Elsewhere I have argued that narrativity is always at hand whether it is the the possibility of weaving a narrative or embroidering narration — as a species humans are in touch with how objects yield events and events become reified; we play with names and sequences interchangeably.

Kristjana Gunnars Reading Marcel Proust in far more elegant style makes a similar case.

It is perhaps impossible to exist without something taking place. To be outside of story would be to not exist.

What confuses is that stories never end. Fictions are false because they provide false endings. There is always a next day: just as the idea of the end of the universe can never gain currency, since it is forever trailed by the question of what is behind the end of the universe.

Earlier in the book there is a passage that provides an example of continuation at work/play. Proceeding a contrario, we follow the next twist...

[The character from Kierkegaard] knows the verity of his own feelings by his reluctance to articulate them. The more he speaks of his feelings, the less real they will be. Love will be spent in the speaking. Transferred out of the nervous system into language, where it will exist in a disembodied form.

But perhaps his trepidation results from the opposite: what he fears is the possibility of bringing his feelings to life by naming them. In language there is self-invention. The fear of creating a relationship where there was none before. Of making a fleeting evanescent relationship, which like all human affairs drifts in the smoke of time, permanent. By writing something you make it eternal.

And open to tagged on interpretations, extrapolations and other sundry extensions.

And so for day 1221
17.04.2010