Waterworks

A meditation upon childhood play with twigs, channels and dams.
Ross Leckie "Breakwaters" in Descant 92/93 (Spring and Summer 1996) Volume 27, Numbers 1 and 2, page 92 ... the poem's final lines:

Currents change and breakwaters erode, slide, suspend,

submerge — the street returns to its routine. It's time

to turn from this river, this local run-off

and its parish curriculum. I'm late for school.

I like how the word "time" is suspended (and the word "suspend" too) at the end of the line.


And so for day 545
10.06.2008

A Smile at A Smile in His Lifetime

Joseph Hansen has his lead character visit a home from his past, a home that time has ravaged.

He steps into the room where he slept. Damp trash lies in the corner where his bed was. There are books without covers. They can't have belonged to him, but he picks one up. It feels at the same time gritty and wet. Even the title page is gone. He reads a phrase, a smile in his lifetime. Something crawls on his hands. He drops the book. Sowbugs have nested in the moist back. He shakes his hands, wipes the crawly feeling off them. He nudges the book with the toe of his clean blue-and-white shoe. So much for the immortality of print.

And the novel where this memento mori is located is called A Smile in His Lifetime.


And so for day 544
09.06.2008

Translation and of Modals

Take four modal categories

Alethic (possible, impossible, necessary)
Deontic (permitted, prohibited, obligatory)
Axiological (good, bad, indifferent)
Epistemic (known, unknown, believed)

And think about their intersection through the lens of ekphrasis and the consideration of visual-verbal translations. I would like to recast the epistemic in terms of "known, knowable, unknowable". This seems to align better with questions of iconoclasism.

I am still not clear as to how I got to known-knowable-unknowable from the destruction of images or the ban on images which operates on a valence of shown/unshown. Perhaps it was more so through the notion that there exists a relation between the verbal and visual and that relation is one of translatability: translated, translatable, untranslatable.

If I go back to the July 9, 2003 blog comment http://calamity.wordherders.net/archives/000422.html at Calamity Jane Takes Aim, I find this began as a remark about the status of the object of ekphrasis (exists, doesn't exist, might exist).

And so for day 543
08.06.2008

Notes on Improvisation

Entry from a 1996 notebook recording a conversation with Craig Squires.

Risks of Improvisation

know people well    danger of falling into old habits

when you don't know the people well     you can't "hear" because you don't know their vocabulary

for people you know well    touch those buttons you "can't" touch

Aleatory aspects more present with people you don't know well

but with people you know the aleatory is mapped onto the emergence of novelty in the relationship

control of adequate redundancy in communication situations

with performance with people you know the third. is there, a sensing of other participants sensing ...

— without risk improv doesn't work.

the punctuation is odd and so is the spacing - familiar and yet disjunctive


And so for day 542
07.06.2008

The Maternal is not One

A boy body (not subject to reproduction) runs through the blogmire attentive to the rustling ruptures:

She is now famous for the distinction between what she calls the "semiotic" and the "symbolic," which she develops in her early work including Revolution in Poetic Language , "From One Identity to the Other" in Desire in Language, and Powers of Horror. Kristeva maintains that all signification is composed of these two elements. The semiotic element is the bodily drive as it is discharged in signification. The semiotic is associated with the rhythms, tones, and movement of signifying practices. As the discharge of drives, it is also associated with the maternal body, the first source of rhythms, tones, and movements for every human being since we all have resided in that body.
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/Kristeva.html
Center for Digital Discourse and Culture @Virginia Tech

Read carefully. Too quick a jump to the maternal association skips over the social & other associations with "rhythms, tones, and movement of signifying practices." Marking a "first source" is like counting with natural numbers. The set of whole numbers brings to mind an origin beyond the source: the rain that feeds the spring. There is some laughter around the bend.

And so for day 541
06.06.2008

Locution Locution Locution

M.A. Screech in his book on Erasmus, Ecstasy and the Praise of Folly, provides this intriguing look into the tradition of a playful expression:

The soul of Paul, says Erasmus, in gloss on II Corinthians 5:13, like the anima of all lovers, 'is not where it animates but where it loves' (anima non est ubi animat, sed ubi amat). This famous phrase which does not occur in the Moira but is implied there, links the ecstatic love explained in the Annotations and praised by Folly, with a millenium and a half of Christian mysticism.

The Latin is special. And to continue reading Screech is in part to learn why.

The standard expression is Verius est anima ubi amat quam ubi animat — the soul, that is, more truly belongs where it loves than where it simply animates. The expression was coined by St Bonaventura (Solioquium II. 2, no. 12, in Opera VIII, Quaracchi 1898, 49, col. 1). Bonaventura took the notion over from St Bernard, where it is less memorable since it is applied to the spiritus, not the anima (ibid. note 5); so in St Bernard there is no play on the words anima and animat. As Bonaventura coined it, it is one of those powerful expressions which was so widely used that its source was sometimes lost to view; Aquinas even attributed it to St Augustine. In the history of mysticism the idea which it embodies constitutes a bridge by which Platonic rapture passed through Pseudo-Dionysius to Bernard, Bonaventura and mediaeval mysticism generally, then on to high Renaissance ecstatics like John of the Cross, as well as to a scholarly saint like François de Sales.

And so for day 540
05.06.2008

Accidental: New Roses

Page 415 in the 2000 paperback edition of China Miéville's Perdido Street Station blooms this piece of typesetting magic which snags my attention like a thorn:

"I do not dream, der Grimnebulin. I am a calculating machine that has calculated how to think. I do not dream. I have no neu-roses, no hidden depths.

The hyphenation is a product of the layout and it somehow is like a dream element that triggers a reverie of associations.


And so for day 539
04.06.2008

Form of a Bifurcation

In Every Force Evolves a Form there is an essay on the painter Balthus, an essay structured as a series of aphoristic paragraphs. In one of those paragraphs, Guy Davenport draws what could be characterized as a distinction between experience and description. He affixes labels to both sides of the distinction and places the subject of the essay in one of the camps:

Where in Greek writing you always find a running account of all the senses in intimate contact with the world, in Latin you find instead a pedantry accustomed to substituting some rhetorical convention for honest and immediate perception. Balthus has Greek wholeness.

Ironic that Davenport is accomplishing the comparison through a trope sketched via a rhetorical dichotomy — a very Latin move.

And so for day 538
03.06.2008

Principles and Stories

The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples advanced four principles for engaging in meaningful relationship building. They are: Recognition, Respect, Sharing and Responsibility. They are presented in that order. I believe that the order matters. A relationship progresses through these stages. The listing of the principles presents a narrative and the narration matters. It's an ongoing story that can be represented as a mandala. In the centre of the square are three principles that are often invoked in models in the design of effective organizations. They do not immediately tell a story, at least not from the point of view of the individual actor, yet they represent, like the RCAP principles, states that are desirable. However, in this mandala formation, one might think that "responsibility" is reached through a cycle of claiming "ownership" and giving an "account" or that responsibility is manifested through owning and accounting. What do you make of this arrangement?



For the complete RCAP report see
http://www.ainc-inac.gc.ca/ap/rrc-eng.asp

And so for day 537
02.06.2008

Within and Between

Justice Bastarache wrote in the Supreme Court of Canada decision in M. v. H. (1999)

http://csc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/1999/1999rcs2-3/1999rcs2-3.html

It would be consistent with Charter values of equality and inclusion to treat all members in a family relationship equally and all types of family relationships equally.

For me the social ideal of equality within and between families resonates with a 1994 vision statement "All people, including youth, determine for themselves their personal relationships. This is based upon the ability to move in and out of relations. This requires the recognition of both formal and substantial rights, both in law and in government policy." http://chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/eqf03.htm


And so for day 536
01.06.2008