Mystery of Self and the Needs of the Body

In the midst of a meditation on the mysteries of food and its consumption comes this passage:

Not just the physiological self, the perpetually hungry, eating, food-besotted self, but the nighttime, dreaming self as well — these rebuff our attempts to understand them, let alone define and control them. Mysterious as we are to one another, we are equally mysterious to ourselves. And this mystery deepens with time, when we see that answers to our questions are in continual retreat, like desert mirages.

from Joyce Carol Oates "Food Mysteries" in Antaeus 68 1992

Tantalus as a figure for our human condition seems to be just out of reach. Without the questions, there would be no mirages. We must, as we breathe, stop asking questions at some time. And that is a mystery.

And so for day 627
31.08.2008

Gardens, relationships, complexity

She introduces "Familiar prettiness" (collected in A Joy of Gardening) with the following paragraph:

The more one gardens, the more one learns; and the more one learns, the more one realizes how little one knows. I suppose the whole of life is like that: the endless complications, the endless difficulties, the endless fight against one thing or another, whether it be green-fly on the roses or the complexity of personal relationships.

A nice take on the labour involved in gardening and in the cultivation of relationships as per Vita Sackville-West. The more and the endless — it seems almost hopeless but we carry on.


And so for day 626
30.08.2008

Use of Imagination

Winifred Gallagher in Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life provides this gem of circumlocution in the interests of anticipating hurdles:

Deciding beforehand what you'll focus on when sticking to your goal becomes difficult can even be a better strategy than trying to rev up your motivation.

Good thing it was preceded by this clear injunction:

[S]ome pragmatic research suggests that it's easier to shift your focus from that rich dessert to your goal of losing those five pounds if you practice ahead of time. When you rehearse in your head how you'll react to the lure of the all-you-can-eat buffet or the neighborhood watering hole before you're standing in front of it, you're much likelier to resist temptation than if you trust in your spontaneous response.

Planning makes sense.


And so for day 625
29.08.2008

Abstraction, purpose of

It's a novel meditating on the reader's relation to the writer. From Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker

[M]aybe when you care, terribly, painfully, about the shape of the world, and you desire nothing but absolute, radical change, you protect yourself with abstraction, distance. Maybe the remoteness of my texts is the measure of my personal involvement? Maybe that chill you describe is a necessary illusion?

Cool sense of disavowal.


And so for day 624
28.08.2008

Triplets

Fadi Abou-Rihan in "Affect-Time" posted at The Psychoanalytic Field provides us with an enlightening tricolon:

Indeed, there is nothing unitary about the drive, the dream, and the transference; the drive is polymorphous, the dream is overdetermined, and the transference is multilayered.

I like the progression from drive through dream to transference. It is a way of introducing a uniform path in all the multiplicity.


And so for day 623
27.08.2008

Dental Pickings

Arthur Quinn in Figures of Speech: 60 ways to turn a phrase in the section on metonymy provides a Biblical example

And I also have given you cleanness of teeth in all your cities, and want of bread in all your places

Amos 4:6

I was a bit puzzled by this until the next page where Quin explains "Sometimes the substitutions are not immediately clear. When in the above passage Amos prophesies that God in His wrath is going to give the Hebrews clean teeth, we know this has nothing to do with dental hygiene. But it is is only on reflection that we realize that you don't have to brush your teeth if you don't eat."

Go figure.


And so for day 622
26.08.2008

What are these shores?

In the collection of poems Mourning in the burned house by Margaret Atwood there is a section devoted to the slow but definite decline of an aged father. In this section, one of the poems is called "King Lear in Respite Care" and from that poem is this passage

Who knows what he knows?

Many things, but where he is

isn't among them. How did it happen.

this cave, this hovel?

It may or many not be noon.

Time, person and place. So rudimentary. Yet so necessary.

And in the final poem in this section, recounting the emergence from a dream state, the speaking voice recognizes "It always takes a long time / to decipher where you are."


And so for day 621
25.08.2008

Step Softly

Ursula K. Le Guin The Telling

Where my guides lead me in kindness I follow, follow lightly, and there are no footprints in the dust behind us.

. . .

And so for day 620
24.08.2008

Dodging Anticipation

William Gibson in this passage from All Tomorrow's Parties invites us to ponder the nature of design:

That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates outcome, the anticipation of outcome guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace.

It is a well crafted sentence that defies anticipation.

And so for day 619
23.08.2008

Glory and Process

Edmund White has suggested that there is something alchemical about James Merrill's poetry. He suggests that the "alertness to transubstantiation is the religious impulse behind Merrill's verse." Take for example this excerpt from a poem from The Inner Room

Open just one
Tiny bronze-purple thurible: briquettes!
Black as coal next year, they'll catch, they'll climb,
Repeating their tribe's miniature
Resurrection myth, where seed is saviour.

Morning glory seeds described by their vivid physical qualities and their gift of potential. Religion buoyed by botany. A smart conceit.

And so for day 618
22.08.2008