Retallack on Waldrop on Stein

Judicious situation of a quotation.

What exceeds anything in [Otto] Weininger's philosophically pretentious, utterly congested "deductive morphologies," as well as Stein's own reductive cataloguing, is the way she has begun to conjecture in the act of her writing that, as Keith Waldrop has put it, "the essential of 'each human being' is a rhythm ... [and] to express that rhythm expresses the person. There is actually no need to talk about the subject."

Joan Retallack is quoting from Keith Waldrop's introduction to Useful Knowledge (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1988) in her introduction to Gertrude Stein: Selections (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

And so for day 2298
29.03.2013

Mindful Mindworks

Antonin Artaud "Le théâtre et la peste" Le théâtre et son double sets up a brilliant parallel between the brain and lungs.

La seconde remarque est que les deux seuls organes réellement atteints et lésés par la peste : le cerveau et les poumons, se trouvent être tous deux sous la dépendance directe de la conscience et de la volonté. On peut s'empêcher de respirer ou de penser, on peut précipiter sa respiration, la rythmer à son gré, la rendre à volonté consciente ou inconsciente, introduire un équilibre entre les deux sortes de respirations ; l'automatique, qui est sous le commandement direct du grand sympathique, et l'autre, qui obéit aux réflexes redevenus conscients du cerveau.

On peut également précipiter, ralentir et rythmer sa pensée. On peut réglementer le jeu inconscient de l'esprit.

Speed up, slow down. Adjust the rhythm. Of thought. Regulate the play not of the unconscious but the unconscious play of the mind.

As aptly put by Mary Caroline Richards:

The second observation is that the only two organs really affected and injured by the plague, the brain and the lungs, are both directly dependent upon the consciousness and the will. We can keep ourselves from breathing or from thinking, can speed up our respiration, give it any rhythm we choose, make it conscious or unconscious at will, introduce a balance between two kinds of breathing: the automatic, which is under the direct control of the sympathetic nervous system, and the other, which is subject to those reflexes of the brain which have once again become conscious.

We can similarly accelerate, retard, and give an arbitrary rhythm to our thinking—can regulate the unconscious play of the mind.

Regulate -- not regiment.

And so for day 2277
08.03.2013

Rhythm: Seen and Heard

This 1954 book by Langston Hughes with pictures by Robin King provides from its first pages evidence that there was an alternative to the eye-ear dichotomy championed by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s - a more holistic view of the world and the senses.

The First Book of Rhythms

From the outset the reader is invited to draw and later to hear. The book ends with paean to the human place in the universe and the glory of rhythm.

But your hand controls the rhythms of the lines you make with your pencil on a paper. And your hand is related to the rhythms of the earth as it moves around the sun, and to the moon as the moon moves around the earth, and to the stars as they move in the great sky — just as all men's lives, and every living thing, are related to those vaster rhythms of time and space and wonder beyond the reach of eye or mind.

Rhythm is something we share in common, you and I, with all the plants and animals and people in the world, and with the stars and moon and sun, and all the whole vast wonderful universe beyond this wonderful earth which is our home.

/\/ /\/ /\/ /\/ /\/ /\/ /\/ /\/ /\/ /\/ /\/ /\/ !!

And so for day 1918
14.03.2012

Rise Up Rhythm

Seen on a T-shirt.

DIG
DA
RID
EM

It took a double take to capture the essence. And when I did, I really dug the link between the power of chant or drum and the casting out of the undesirable: rhythm to be rid of them. If only change in the world were a matter of incantation... necessary but not sufficient. I fondly remember the goddess chant of the Radical Faeries. Charlie Murphy's "Burning Times" incorporates the chant by Deena Metzger: Isis, Astarte, Diana, Hecate, Demeter, Kali, Inanna. And it was through the Faeries that I first heard a rendition of the inspiring "Brother Warrior" by Kate Woolf. Insufficient but necessary.

And so for day 295
05.10.2007