The Body, Its Environment, Its Exercise

Northrop Frye captured something of the imprinting that happens when good models abound. And are taken up, bodily.

Now if we write in a way that we never speak, the first thing that disappears is the rhythm. It is hardly possible to give any spring or bounce to words unless they come out of our own bodies and are, like dancing or singing, an expression of physical as well as mental energy. The second thing that disappears is the color. It is hardly possible to use vivid language unless one is seeing the imagery of oneself: even abstract words, if they are genuinely possessed by the person using them, will still retain something of the concrete metaphor they originally had. The third thing that disappears is the sense of personality, which only a basis in personal speech can ever supply.

My emphasis
The Well-Tempered Critic

There is a neat twist here. By focalizing the passage through the plural "we" we gain multiple "bodies". Our Bodies Our Selves. Our Poems Our Lives.

And so for day 2363
02.06.2013

Writing and Intimations of Mortality

Robert Bringhurst
The Solid Form of Language: An Essay on Writing and Meaning
Gaspereau Press, 2004


The final section worth quoting in full with its carefully stacked repetitions of keywords:

A script is not a language — and the classification of scripts is as different from the classification of languages as the classification of clothes is from the classification of people. Writing, nevertheless, is many things, used by different people in many different ways. In itself, it is both less and more than language. More because it can develop into rich and varied forms of graphic art. Less because, much as we love it, it is not an inescapable part of the human experience or the perennial human condition. If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain — and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior. Humans lived on the earth successfully — and so far as we know, quite happily — for a hundred thousand years without the benefit of writing. They have never lived, nor ever yet been happy, so far as we know, in the absence of language.

Script is extra. But such a vital vibrant extra.

And so for day 2353
23.05.2013

Seduction-Memory-Writing

Reminder: memory is collective.

Just what is different about face-to-face and online interaction? A posting to the Humanist Discussion List asked: How is this situation no different than what Plato worried about, and how is it different?

I could repeat the synapse view of the relations between computer-mediated to in-person communication: sparks jump the gaps between the social and electronic networks. Instead I want to raise a consideration of a triplet-at-play in our reading tradition stemming from Plato where writing stands in for technology. We have three elements at play: seduction, memory, writing.

Memory mediates between the other two and serves as the ground for adjudication. It is with memory that we judge the fitness of the writing and the goodness of the seduction. The question as to whether writing damages memory is often the starting point of discussions. This is in effect a move that lands us in media res — right smack in the middle of a narrative of decline. Trying to keep the seduction-memory-writing triad in mind as a circuit problematizes any narrative be it of triumphant technology or social decadence.

Seduction seems to be perennially under theorized. I would suggest that there is an art to being seduced as much as there is to seducing (being a good guest as much as being a good host). Plato via Socrates puts a premium on seduction as a means of education, if I recall correctly.

And so for day 2323
23.04.2013

Begrudgingly

A comment on bourgeois realism?

If language is generated out of conventions, those conventions are simply tactics. They are methods of allowing a reproduction of the world. They do not cause problems. They are not material. They are naturalistic.

Bruce Andrews "Constitution / Writing, Politics, Language, The Body"
in Paradise & Method: Poetics & Praxis

What opens up for me here is a way of thinking not in terms of "allowing" reproduction but of "inducing" reproduction. And not only of the world as it is but as it might become.

As well, tactics call for strategies.

The political dimension of writing isn't just based on the idea of challenging specific problems or mobilizing specific groups to challenge specific problems; it's based on the notion of a systemic grasp — not of language described as a fixed system but of language as a kind of agenda or system of capabilities and uses.

"Total Equals What: Poetics & Praxis"

"And reception is by bodies" - a turn of the page again to reproduction in its expansive sense.

And so for day 1601
02.05.2011