Water and Oats: Bilingual Letters

Nicole Brossard
A Tilt in the Wondering
Vallum Chapbook Series No. 15

at this point language shifts as we read
persil brebis and ontology
for I was not refraining myself
about the water needed in beauty
la folle avoine des sens the floating reliability

I love how water/eau is inscribed in beauty. And the reliable repetition in reverse direction when oat/avoine is set floating.

And so for day 2322
22.04.2013

Rorty Views

Like scenes pasted by chance in a scrapbook.

Source
Richard Rorty. Contingency, irony, and solidarity.

Picture Frame
A recipe for language games.

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that. The realization that the world does not tell us what language games to play should not, however, lead us to say that a decision about which to play is arbitrary, nor to say that it is the expression of something deep within us. The moral is not that objective criteria for choice of vocabulary are to be replaced with subjective criteria, reason with will or feeling. It is rather that the notions of criteria and choice (including that of "arbitrary" choice) are no longer in point when it comes to changes from one language game to another. Europe did not decide to accept the idiom of Romantic poetry, or of socialist politics, or of Galilean mechanics. That sort of shift was no more an act of will than it was a result of argument. Rather, Europe gradually lost the habit of using certain words and gradually acquired the habit of using others.

Picture
Snapshot of history.

Where the metaphysician sees the modern Europeans as particularly good at discovering how things really are, the ironist sees them as particularly rapid in changing their self-image, in re-creating themselves.

Stereoscopic Cameo
One moment, two points.

In a book with few allusive moments, it is worth remarking when Rorty appeals to the plot lines of an 18th-century English novel.

Such people will find Heidegger's andenkendes Denken no more urgent a project than Uncle Toby's attempt to construct a model of the fortifications of Namur.

Note worthy because in the next chapter there is a footnote that remarks upon allusion recognition (and is a gem for the people who recognized the reference to Tristram Shandy in the piece quoted above).

We Derrida admirers are tempted [to annotate] but such temptations should be resisted. Nobody wants a complete set of footnotes to The Post Card any more than they want one to Finnegans Wake, Tristram Shandy, or Remembrance of Things Past. The reader's relation with the authors of such books depends largely upon her being left alone to dream up her own footnotes.

And so we leave you, gentle people, to dream up your own scrapbooks, life and opinions.

And so for day 1224
20.04.2010

Learning languages and games of self-construction

Juxtaposing the passage about language [langue] minus speech [parole] from Roland Barthes as translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith in Elements of Semiology

Moreover, this social product is autonomous, like a game with its own rules, for it can be handled only after a period of learning.

with a passage from Stephen Batchelor from Buddhism Without Beliefs

Who "I am" appears coherent only because of the monologue we keep repeating, editing, censoring, and embellishing in our heads.

and through mindful attentiveness and we observe that the sentence quoted above is preceded by this one

And instead of a coherent personality that stretches back in an unbroken line to a first memory and looks forward to an indefinite future, we discover a self ridden with gaps and ambiguities. Who "I am" appears [...]

If there is a game in which one manages the pauses and the breaks, it is worth learning. Meditation as game. Gaming as language learning. Skipping along.

And so for day 222
24.07.2007