Double Sortes

Ephemera comes in many guises. Consider offprints used as packing materials. Such a one came across my way one day. The text so delivered by chance occurences served as a most suitable pretext for a parlour game. Long after playing the game, basing myself on the pagination and title in the framework and conducting a bit of full text searching, I have been able to track down the complete reference. Gordon Shrimpton reviewed Andrew Wolpert, Remembering Defeat: Civil War and Civic Memory in Ancient Athens and Nicole Loraux, The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens in the Phoenix the Journal of the Classic Association of Canada Volume LVII No 3-4 (Fall-Winter 2004).

A friend and I played a game. Pick a sentence.

The present is shaped by how we remember the past, but it is also true that our recollections are shaped by our understanding of the present.

Invite a friend to pick another sentence.

The truth is you cannot really decide to forget, only to ignore.

And marvel together at the snug fit of the lifted bits.

And so for day 178
10.06.2007

Candied Chestnuts

Ephemera entrances. On the inside cover of a box of Motta Marrons glacés one finds a beautiful silhouette (gold on blue) of castanea sativa, the chestnut tree, and to the side of the illustration is a passage from Robert Bourdu, Le Châtaignier that ends on this sentence:

Son fruit, autrefois appelé le pain des pauvres, est devenu un trésor gourmand, le marron glacé.

Captivating, to consider the role of sugar (and empire) in transforming pauper's food into luxury item.


And so for day 177
09.06.2007

Taking Tea

"Talking Tea" is a Jim Thomas poem, found among other places in Ukula Volume 3 Number 1. It is a poem whose addressee is an at times intimate:

I love it when you talk tea.
I love your lips upon the rim,
your fingers around the handle

And at times inanimate but made alive by the verse for the poem also chooses to apostrophize the tea that talks:

and you, dry leaves between perforated sheets
of cotton, are dangled

The poem ends with a voice uttered sybil-like from the position of the teacup:

Later
smiling
into empty cups
stained with tannin
and soggy leaves,
you seize me and turn me upside down

for a fortune reading, a telling talk.

And so for day 176
08.06.2007

Concert

From the introduction by Charles Taylor to the Tapir Press bilingual edition of Ernest Renan's Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? What is a Nation?

Precisely because it is so inextricably linked to the idea of the sovereignty of a people, the idea of the nation reaches beyond itself to the idea of a concert of nations.

L'idée de la nation, justement parce qu'elle est liée inextricablement avec celle de la souvraineté du peuple, nous renvoie au-dela d'elle-même, à l'idée du concert des nations.

"Concert" it's a verb too.

And so for day 175
07.06.2007

On or at the edge

I am fascinated by where the claims of poets might carry the reader. Take for instance the following view from Don McKay, Griffin Poetry Prize nominee, as reported in The Toronto Star Jun 04, 2007

My view is that poetry is the point where language is humbled by the sense that it realizes that it isn't able to adequately describe the world […] There's something that eludes it. And so it's language pointing beyond its own capacities.

A place beyond pointing. That is where the humility lies. Situated in the vicinity of pointing at its own powers to describe its own position in the world. Poetry bends where language waves break. The words unravel into sounds or glyphs. Order reshaped. And in the reshaping still ordered.


And so for day 174
06.06.2007

Shapes

"Micromelismata" by Michele Leggott graphs quantities and quantities of little kisses and its layout on two side by side pages (in DIA) (re)traces lip to lip contact. Having dwelt in that poem it is perhaps no wonder that I see in the layout of the first lines of "Phrases from Orpheus" by D.G. Jones the picture of a key. A symbol not unrelated to the poem’s theme:

There


is


a


     pardon guaranteed


prison
behind the eyes


     by death

Look at from the side one almost sees a key with its handle and its teeth.

And so for day 173
05.06.2007

Boom!

A commonplace blog is like the tape recorders described in The Ticket That Exploded by William S. Burroughs.

Here are some excerpts spliced into a new ordering:

A tape recorder is an externalized section of the human nervous system.

You are to infiltrate, sabotage and cut communications [...] A camera and two tape recorders can cut the lines laid down by a fully equipped film studio [...] And always remember you are operating under conditions of guerrilla war — Never attempt to hold a position under massive attack [...] The operation of retreat on this level involves shifting three-dimensional coordinate points that is time travel on association lines

listen to your present time tapes and you will begin to see who you are and what you are doing here     mix yesterday in with today and hear tomorrow your future rising out of old recordings     you are a programmed tape recorder set to record and play back

who programs you

who decides what tapes play back in present time

who plays back your old humiliations and defeats holding you in prerecorded preset time

Word evokes image does it not? —— Try it —— Put an image track on screen and accompany it with any sound track —— Now play the sound track back alone and watch the image track fill in —— So? What is word? —— Maya —— Maya —— [...] a Morse code of color flashes —— or odors or music or tactile senstations —— Anything can represent words and letters and association blocks —— Go on try it and see what happens —— science pure science

Just what does it mean to be held in "rerecorded preset time"? To be held in time? How would it differ from passing through time?

And so for day 172
04.06.2007

On the Reanimation of Tradition

In Confucius — The Secular as Sacred Herbet Fingarette paints Confucious, Jesus and Gautama Buddha as men who have “genuinely and profoudly and self-consciously reanimated their traditions” and there is a hint, for me, of Martin Buber in the affirmation

Shared tradition brings men together and enables them to be men. Every abandonment of tradition is a separating of men. Every authentic reanimation of tradition is a reuniting of men.

This seems almost tautological after the sentence the precedes it:

Only as we grow up genuinely shaped, through and through, by traditional ways can we be human; only as we reanimate this tradition where new circumstances render it otiose can we preserve integrity and direction in our life.

Given a tradition of reanimation, I might be tempted by this only path of being human. Being a social and political creature, yes. Being human: tradition is an insufficient ground. Not a wonder that the prose moves from consideration of being human to the union of men. There is something incommunicable in being human. Still we strive, we the wordsmiths, to make it known and sharable.

And so for day 171
03.06.2007

Observations

Sometimes lines come to you

lizard skin (of) lychees
dusted with clay

aching for the context of a larger poem.

And so for day 170
02.06.2007

Cartography

First stanza:

We are fooled by the map.

Because of the map

we are tricked into setting out.

Last stanza, also in a sense the first:

We are always setting out, as if

to discover where the map ends

will allow us to begin.

Both stanzas from "[hornbook G]" in The Hornbooks of Rita K by Robert Kroetsch. And the middle stanza hints at the journey interrupted in media res.

And so for day 169
01.06.2007