Three Takes on the Untold Taken

There was Wallace Stevens ("The Relations between Poetry and Painting" in The Necessary Angel) who drew on Simone Weil:

Simone Weil in La Pesanteur et La Grâce has a chapter on what she calls decreation. She says that decreation is making pass from the created to the uncreated, but that destruction is making pass from the created to nothingness.

There was in Decreation Anne Carson, who in an essay and an opera explores the work of Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil and examines jealous triangles, states of ecstasy and the challenges of telling. Two sentences from the essay

To tell is a function of self.
[...]
If we study the way these three writers tell about their own telling, we can she how each of them feels moved to create a sort of dream of distance in which the self is displaced from the centre of the work and the teller disappears into the telling.

And the opera has a neat disappearing/appearing trick in Part Two working through the material from Marguerite Porete there is a chorus of 33 questions where a series of letters in the text are bolded (in a mesostic style, as set of "j" followed by "a" followed by a set of "l" and then "o" etc. The chorus of questions has a second part which is a layout on the vertical of numbers 1 to 33 and the letters that were bolded in the first part: the result is a stuttering questioning of the word "jaloux?" ... JJAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLOOOOOOOOOUUX? All this work of show and tell would almost be for nought if not for the preceding essay and yet the opera stands alone in its manipulation of letters in their vocal and visual manifestations and how the semantic is sometimes just out of reach — decreated.

There was the character Stephen King in the novel Song of Susannah: Dark Tower VI by Stephen King.

I think telling stories is like pushing something. Pushing against uncreation itself, maybe. And one day while you were doing that you felt something pushing back.

TH TH TH E RRR E

And so for day 1322
27.07.2010