Deluge II

(If only to move that lovely picture a little further from the surface of the blog, I present the following)

To be is not to be: this is the answer.

I am constantly remembering and working through the things people tell me.

Punctuation is the organization of living, vocal speech.

What a pain that Freud ever happened.

It is at times a degradation to read a man in the context of the class.

To become an -ian is to enter and relive the past at the absolute expulsion of the present.

Poetic expression is the only creative project which can be said to factically move us forward.

America once signified the new. We lay claim to this in reinvigorating theory by a strictly literary application.

I am constantly forgetting who I am !


(By way of response, redirecting of, and admission to the admirable aquatic admiral's most recent tripartial amendations, I provide the following, in ossianic meter.)

Regarding what I wrote that day. I must emphasize that I was speaking from a theoretical standpoint, and that I was talking about myself. What I hoped was that I was also talking about the general 'us'.

Theorists approach things from a notion of 'oughts.' We want to know what this is, this that we are in, this that we are thrown into and forced to confront and negotiate every day. We are happy to find that others also want to know. And so we speak to and for these others. [Genius is to want to have something to add. The genius is always finding his thoughts already said, and upon finding this, resolves always anew to think something original.]

The question of nonaction is such a question of oughts. If I am to continue wondering, what am I to do? Where shall I go? What shall be my vocation? Nonaction is such a vocation. It is an answer. What I was asking is: Is it THE answer?

To speak on a subject more clearly:

That day when you tried to explain to me, along the lines that Foucault provides, that every work must be understood as somehow reacting to (and thus constructed by) its historical context, I disagreed because it seemed to me that such would be to leave everything in the past and, moreover, to deny a meaning that can transcend the death of people and the passing of events. I suppose I realize now that there is no way around the fact that a work is historically confined. A thing I would say, just to get my bit, is that some works are more affected by the times than others, and that some authors manage quite admirably to create ecstatic pieces, pieces which can appear wholly original for their time, and that even if you could show what they were responding to, that this would not diminish or in any way change how original and unlike anything else those works were. But my main realization in relation to your point is that while historical influence is of necessity a fact, to move forward, to create anything anew, anything useful and progressive (or progressively-digressive, as with a work engaging the death drive), one must not look at things in terms of their context. One must take them straight out. One must read them on their own, read the books without knowing hardly anything about them, and form an opinion and interpretation based on nothing but one's own subjective impulses as they happen to arrange themselves at the time of reading. This was my general situation with Nietzsche. He is someone that I think should not be read in class. Because there is so much there to interest an individual, in his style as well as in his points, so many concepts that ought to really shake one's mental representation of existence in this world: to read the book in a class context tends to only mute those effects and divert the focus somewhere else. I would say that if one is to do anything at all, to make anything out of those works, to insure their continued lived experience (as opposed to the gross recapitulation of enduring eulogization), one must do with the works exactly what I have said here: one must read them for their own sake. And by 'their,' I denote both the books and the readers.

(As per last instantiation of this prosal mode, I conclude with something in the manner of the Absinth):

Song to the Sun

Various religions give us a picture of world created and destroyed repeatedly, our current world being only one segment in the process. Christianity posited it all just within this current segment, beginning with one ending, the deluge, and ending with another, the fall of a star which would poison the waters of the earth and so set in motion the period of judgment.

I cannot be this, for I am not a star. But you, my friend, my father and fire, you will at once take us back into your crushing embrace.