Discovery in Repetition and Repeating

This is a longish piece from Januaray 10, 2003, here transcribed from two pages of longhand.

Gertrude Stein's Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia

A close reading of a passage and a bit of translation à la Erasmian De Copia has led me to understand that Stein's use of such terms as "there" plays with their states as both diectics and as delimiters. "There" as diectic points to a place. "There" as delimiter points towards an area — it circumscribes a space. And when you add a delimited space to a copula something astonishing happens: a moment of space, a movement of time.

There is all there is when there has all there has where there is what there is.

But who wants to work at parsing? Not I. My eye catches on the "when" and the "where" and my mind thinks of a reversal of the categories of time and space (at least in this piece of discourse) and so using Stein's proclivity for gerunds, I generate:

what there is is there where having all there when having there all there being there

And her famous quip about Oakland — there being no there there gains new or renewed resonance. And if the reversal is dropped and if the gerund is gone and one respects the syntax of Stein and simply substitutes a nice word anticipating a garden in spring:

green is all green is when green has all green where green is what green is

What is remarkable about the sentence is that the ends possess a semantic immediacy. Lacking that tautological expression, the middle is hared to hold onto. Dizzying.

And yet. A pace. And the vertigo subsides.

Stein writes earlier in the piece:

There is not that precision when there has not been an imagination. There has not been that kind of abandonment. Nobody is alone.

There, in that spot, in that place, is all there. A sort of abandonment of the imagination, letting it go, leaving it behind, becomes that uncanny ability to remember Blake and to concentrate a universe in a tiny space. The imagination has not been. It begins again. And the way it begins again is simply by remembering nobody is alone.

Not I in my writing. Not you in your reading. Each with each other and with others. All tugging at any moment to be in a there with all there there.

And so for day 637
10.09.2008

Repetition and Discovery

I have quoted elsewhere on the blog from Simon McBurney's piece that appeared in Brick (Winter 2004) and my selection focused on the importance of following directions and how the order of gestures serves a mnemonic. See Order disorder.

Following on that selection from McBurney is a meditation on repetition which deserves a place of its own.

It is not just that you get better at it through repetition; rather, that through the act of repeating, you dig down into the material and find the new under your hand where you did not know it.

Deserves repeating with a bit of variation. Just above this archaeological take on repetition is the simple assertion:

The sequence is the thing. The order is all.

The doing over and over is not the same.

And so for day 636
09.09.2008

You Can Get There There

Roo Borson in Short Journey Upriver Toward Ōishida muses on the phenomenology of place.

Ōishida still exists on the map. I would someday like to go there. whether it would be the same Ōishida Bashō knew is another question. Nonetheless I would like to walk the streets and see for myself. There are places one cannot go except in literature, and all ordinary human commerce, keeps us from.

Deserves repeating

There are places one cannot go except in literature, and all ordinary human commerce, keeps us from.

There is a there there — if you start from hearing the here and now, start by reading.

And so for day 635
08.09.2008

Two or Three Takes on Madness

Douglas Coupland in the Massey Lectures (delivered as a novel in five hours) has a character who has been a receptionist in the office of a psychiatrist. The character has an interesting take on being a little crazy and on medications.

First comes the bit about inheritance and madness:

"Me? I don't know. Maybe I didn't learn much. I work as a receptionist for three psychiatrists. I see a lot of crazy. But I think crazy people — okay, not crazy, but people at the extremes of normal behaviour — are more interesting than so-called normal people. I've learned that one of the biggest indicators for success in life is having a few crazy relatives. So long as you get only some of the crazy genes, you don't end up crazy; you merely end up different. And it's that difference that gives you an edge, that makes you successful."

Next comes the piece about meds:

I've also learned that if you're on meds, it's much better to stick to them. I mean, would you rather jump off a bridge because you couldn't be bothered to take one lousy pill? Also, when agitated patients come in, I tell them some kind of story about my cat, Rusty. Listening to people tell stories is very soothing. When someone is telling you a story, they hijack the personal narrator that lives inside your head. It's the closest we come to seeing through someone else's eyes.

I like the quasi-metafictional move to commenting on the nature of narrative. Plus there is the neat segue from a homeopathic explanation of genetic inheritance (a little bit goes a long way) to the little pill of daily medication. It's all in the dosage of what we allow into our heads — and a little reading goes a long way. Keeps you on the edge.

And so for day 634
07.09.2008

Value of diversion

Kate Taylor in a Globe and Mail (12.03.11) review of Finding the Words: Writers on Inspiration, Desire, War, Celebrity, Exile and Breaking the Rules edited by Jared Bland concludes the review with a little summary of her favourite piece.

And, in my favourite piece, Steven Heighton waxes poetic about empty stretches of unproductive time that we might call boredom, but which he judges to be a crucial as dreams for literary inspiration. Without a lot of nothingness, how can any writer ever find the words?

Gives new meaning to the expression "there's nothing to it."

And so for day 633
06.09.2008

Farms, factories and camps

Extending a comparison

The industrial farm is said to have been patterned on the factory production line. In practice, it invariably looks more like a concentration camp.

So concludes Wendell Berry in "The Pleasure of Eating" in Antaeus 68.

And so for day 632
05.09.2008

White Egrets: scattered fragments

Derek Walcott ends one of the poems collected in White Egrets with the following evocative lines:

be grateful that you wrote well in this place,

let the torn poems sail from you like a flock

of white egrets in a long last sigh of release.

Very memorable for anyone who has torn paper and thrown the pieces in the air. And how strange to read such words in a hard cover volume. And now on screen.

And so for day 631
04.09.2008

Howard translating Deleuze describing

Richard Howard translator of Proust & Signs by Gilles Deleuze renders a description of a party attended by characters who have aged. It is exquisite.

Mme de Guermantes's salon with the aging of its guests, makes us see the distortion of features, the fragmentation of gestures, the loss of co-ordination of muscles, the formation of moss, lichen, patches of mold on bodies, sublime disguises, sublime senilities.

I am truly captivated by that phrase "sublime senilities" — something desperate yet noble about it.

And so for day 630
03.09.2008

Shinkichi Takahashi

Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto chose to conclude The Penguin Book of Zen Poetry with selections from the poetry of Shinkichi Takahashi. The concluding poem is jaunty in tone.

ABSENCE

Just say, 'He's out' —

back in

five billion years!

This ending poem reminds me of the beginning of an other, "SEA OF OBLIVION".

Future, past, the sea

of oblivion,

with present capsized

The representation of time present as a shipwreck resonates nicely with eons long cycles.

And so for day 629
02.09.2008

Garamond for the Millennium

My copy of this short but illuminating article is a photocopy, clipped. From internal evidence I know of its having appeared at sometime in EyeWire - no indication of time or place. One sentence is highlighted in pink marker:

Ms. Warde had to publish her research under a man's name for it to be accepted, and not until her work achieved recognition could she tell the world who really wrote it.

Robin Williams in "The Official Typeface of the New Millennium" chose Garamond for a variety of reasons related to its gracefulness and also for a side note about its history. To whit, "in 1926 Beatrice Warde successfully proved that it was designed by Jean Jannon, not Claude Garamond, 80 years after Claude died in 1561 (it was based on Garamond's type designs)." Hence the conclusion drawn by Ms. Williams: "So this typeface that will take us into the new millennium has important contributions from both men and women in the field of typography."

And so for day 628
01.09.2008