"...the practico-inert puts up with arbitrary demands: a friendship is not only a matter of day-by-day existence; it also falls into the past and becomes a set reality that we are compelled to accept...." (22)

"...when I lost myself in the object upon which I gazed, or in moments of physical or emotional ecstasy, or in the delight of memory, or in the heart-raising anticipation of what was to come, it seemed to me that I brought about the impossible junction between the in-itself and the for-itself. And I also wanted to realize myself in books that, like those I had loved, would be existing objects for others, but objects haunted by a presence-- my presence." (29)

"To begin with I was amorphous, but I was not manifold. On the contrary, what strikes me is the way the little girl of three lived on, grown calmer, in the child of ten, that child in the young woman of twenty, and so forward." (29)

"One of the meanings of paranoia is a refusal to abandon the subjective position: we are all more or less affected by it; we are all more or less blind to our inert presence in the Other's world. Yet from time to time some incident destroys my pullucid familiarity with myself. Friends point out words I have uttered or things I have done without noticing it; I said or did them without the least suspicion of having done so, and this realization disturbs me." (37-38)

"Every historical period is an absolute entity, one that cannot be compared with others by any universal criterion. THe varying destinies of mankind do not challenge one another. The future's wealth does not impoverish me." (39)

"No work that has reference to the world can be a mere transcription, since the world has not the power of speech. Facts do not determine their own expression; they dictate nothing. The person who recounts them finds out what he has to say about them through the art of saying it. If he produces no more than commonplace, conventional observations, then he is outside the scope of literature, but if on the other hand his living voice is heard, then he is within it." (115)

"In all cases, if the work is successfully accomplished it is defined as a unique universal in the imaginary mode. By means of this work the authors provides himself with a fictitious constitution: Sartre is referring to this operation when he states that every writer is inhabited by a 'vampire.' The I that speaks stands at a distance from the I that has been experienced, just as each sentence stands at a distance from the experience out of which it arises." (115)

"Bourgeois culture is a promise: it is a promise of a world that makes sense; a world whose good things may be enjoyed with a clear conscience; a world that guarantees sure and certain values forming an essential part of our lives and giving them the magnificence of an Idea. It was by no means easy to tear myself away from such splendid expectations." (117)

"The human being, stripped of pretensions and reduced to its simple truth, has something comic, ludicrous and touching about it, and at times something mysterious, as we see in Senecio: the name calls to mind both old age and the flower of the coltsfoot (senecio) and the picture shows us a lunar, childish face.
"The title makes one think: for although there is nothing literary about Klee's painting, words have great importance in it-- he brings printed and written letters into his pictures and he chooses his titles with great care, so that they form part of the painting and modify its meaning. It is these interchanges between the written language and that of painting, between the various earthly creatures, and between nature and architecture that give Klee's world its poetry. His process is the opposite of Picasso's, for Picasso's painting breaks reality down and analyses it. Klee sees it as a universal presence that beyond its apparent limits: everything is bound to the cosmos as a whole, and it is the painter's task to make this connection visible by isolating the analogies that exist between all things." (205-206)

"A person is shown as clearly by what he does not grasp as by what he does; sometimes even more so. Both Louis XVI and the last Tsar, by writing in effect 'Today, nothing' in their private diaries when revolution was breaking out all round them, tell us more about themselves than by any of their words or deeds." (23)

"One shatters the rational world by blind violence: for want of a solution, it is a radical means of escape." (31)

"[Klee's] is above all the vision of a world in gestation, begotten by the vectors, arrows and vortices. 'Adventures of the line,' as Michaus rightly put it." (205)

"A journey is also a personal adventure, a change in my relationship with the world, with space and time. It often begins in bewilderment: the novelty of the place and the people make me lose my head and I am filled with a desire to do a great many things and to do them all at once." (213)

Simone de Beauvoir, All Said and Done

on resuscitating words

"...Literature-- and I mean literature that matches up to these requirements-- is the Promised Land in which language becomes what it really ought to be.
It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty-- that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meanings, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the spark that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances.
At this point, I don't wish to dwell on the possible sources of this epidemic, whether they are to be sought in politics, ideology, bureaucratic uniformity, the monotony of the mass media, or the way the schools dispense the culture of the mediocre. What interests me are the possibilities of health. Literature, and perhaps literature alone, can create the antibodies to fight this plague in language.
[57]... it is not just language that seems to have been struck by this pestilence. Consider visual images, for example. We live in an unending rainfall of images. The most powerful media transform the world into images and multiply it by means of the phantasmagoric play of mirrors. These are images stripped of the inner inevitability that ought to mark every image as form and as meaning, as a claim on the attention and as a source of possible meanings. Much of this cloud of visual images fades at once, like the dreams that leave no trace in the memory, but what does not fade is a feeling of alienation and discomfort.
But maybe this lack of substance is not to be found in images or in language alone, but in the world itself. This plague strikes also at the lives of people and the history of nations. It makes all histories formless, random, confused, with neither beginning nor end."

- Italo Calvino, pp. 56-57, "Exactitude," Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

poetry: selving

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves--goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace; that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is--
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

- Gerard Manley Hopkins, "As kingfishers catch fire"

on too-common turns of phrase

Her smile had opened naturally, not like an umbrella, and while he watched her laugh folded and became a smile again, a smile that was neither “wry,” “ironical” nor “mysterious.”

- Nathaniel West, Miss Lonelyhearts, pg. 12.

on a flood of feeling, writing

I wrote. I wrote despair. Writing does well at the end of an edge of oneself. Ti-Cirique no longer had time to read my things. He was overwhelmed by my avalanche of words undoing the alphabet, by my sadness cut up by commas to teach silences; that despondency which inspired my words slamming into each other impaled on hyphens, or these word left unfinished that would open the pages to my Arcadius. I would let my tears dry to burden each i with a dot. I would string the beads of my shivers onto threads of ink and crush them waiting for them to bloom in my closed notebooks. I would tie together the memories… and I grated them together like manioc, making ink from the tears I cried. I wrote haikais colder than seventeen coffin nails, plowed lines bitter as toad gall. I wrote dictionary words which popped out of me like a deadman’s clots and left me more anemic than a cow hanging at a slaughterhouse. I wrote feelings which mingled verbs the way sleeper-women do. I wrote colors like Rimbaud having visions. I wrote melancholy which reinforced mine. I wrote blinking howls which made my ink run by. I wrote thinking involuntary, coming from God knows where like frightened she-dogs… writers are mad to live out such things in their heart; he would tell me that today’s writers don’t go through such things anymore: they’ve lost the primal drive of writing which comes out of you like necessity, which you wrestle (forever along), your life getting in a tangle with death, in the holy inexpressible. And out of that kind of drama, no one can make a profession.

-Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 359, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

an addiction for writing

I then gained a taste for notebooks: you could yank out stained pages, the squares would discipline my hand; what’s more, it looked like a book to me; it was possible to read it again, leaf through it, smell it. A brand new notebook, woah! I got carried away, the beauty of the pages, the promise of blankness, its threat too, this fear when the first word is inscribed and calls for the rush of a world one is never sure to tame.

-Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 321-322, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

elegy in the making

It’s around that time, you know, that I began to write, that is: to die a little.

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 322, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on the magic of words

… I skimmed many books, read lots of poems, bits of paragraphs, spellbinding moments. … For me, each book released an aroma, a voice, a time, a moment, a pain, a presence; each book cast a light or burdened me with its shadow; I was terrified feeling these souls, tied up in one hum, crackling under my fingers.

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 218, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

more inadequacy of the static (language)

…writing is to be fought: in it the inexpressible becomes indecency.

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 202, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on being locked into words

The feeling of death became even more present when I began to write about myself, and about Texaco. It was like petrifying the tatters of my flesh. I was emptying my memory into immobile notebooks without having brought back the quivering of the living life which at each moment modifies what’s just happened. Texaco was dying in my notebooks though it wasn’t finished. And I myself was dying there though I felt the person I was now (pledged to what I was going to be) still elaborating. Oiseau Cham, is there such a thing as writing informed by the word, and by the silences, and which remains a living thing, moving in a circle, and wandering all the time, ceaselessly irrigating with life the things written before, and which reinvents the circle each time like a spiral which at any moment is in the future, ahead, each loop modifying the other, nonstop, without losing a unity difficult to put into words?

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 322, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on overlapping and understanding

I RISE out of my depths with my language.
You rise out of your depths with your language.

Two tongues from the depths,
Alike only as a yellow cat and a green parrot are alike,
Fling their staccato tantalizations
Into a wildcat jabber
Over a gossamer web of unanswerables.

The second and the third silence,
Even the hundredth silence,
Is better than no silence at all
(Maybe this is a jabber too—are we at it again, you and I?)

I rise out of my depths with my language.
You rise out of your depths with your language.

One thing there is much of; the name men call it by is time; into this gulf our syllabic pronunciamentos empty by the way rockets of fire curve and are gone on the night sky; into this gulf the jabberings go as the shower at a scissors grinder’s wheel….

- Carl Sandburg, Cornhuskers, 41. Jabberers

on words spoken in anger

LET me be monosyllabic to-day, O Lord.
Yesterday I loosed a snarl of words on a fool,
on a child.
To-day, let me be monosyllabic … a crony of old men
who wash sunlight in their fingers and
enjoy slow-pacing clocks.

- Carl Sandburg, Cornhuskers, Monosyllabic

bodies, i have in mind

A "discourse": in the first instance, a plurality of words, a diversity of elements come from elsewhere or a former time; but also a singularity, orienting these fragments of divers pasts, adjusting them to tally with the initial spell, and fashioning them into the language of the same ineffable something that had been given first in the form of a smell. (37)

Thus broken down into so many divisions and subdivisions, the primitive "flair" is transformed into verbal analysis.
That strange discourse [of questioning the possessed nuns] establishes a code. Proper names create points of reference and delimit regions within the neutral anonymity of the diabolical terrain. The naming might appear to be a deciphering, as if the goal were first to delineate, in that mass of gesticulations [which reveal the specific demon], the nocturnal forces moving the bodies from below, and then to give a verbal identity to those demons. In reality, the process is the opposite. Here, it is rather of the scientific type. The names of the demons superimpose a grid on the surface of phenomena. The task of exorcism is to draw out of the "mixture" presented to it by the possessed the body proper, the pure element corresponding to the conceptual model.
Today we can say that the verbal imperialism does not provide the necessary conditions for a real verification. It leaves the possessed few possibilities of resistance, since they themselves "enter" into the system and conform to it. The coding always "works" because the functioning is purely tautological, since the operation takes place within a closed domain. For the exorcists, the difficulty resides not in securing a means of verification of the code, but in keeping "the girls" within the closure of the discourse. (39)

…as is often done, they go to the next girl: In order to keep the discourse homogeneous, the terrain into which the outside has crept in is abandoned, and the work is resumed in a language demonologically "proper." (40)

…no personal element [must] be permitted to compromise the automatic functioning of the diabolical grammar. (40)

A question of language, then. But a closed language. It is reached through the unconsciousness, as in a dream. The devil’s language is an other language, into which one does not enter by means of an apprenticeship. One must be "possessed" by these words, without understanding them. (41)

- Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language, on the possession at Loudun

technology and love (daphne marlatt)

how little the reach, what is love love? its
impossible repeat attenuated through telephone
wire the light letter language of 'fax it,' hearts
darling and x's intend body's imprint, stand in for
the unremitting smell of your skin just there at
neck's bony hollow in your hair both kinds that
arc the pelvic ridge keys your other speech
close up and swollen lips aflare with wet
declaration bold face - without which i sleep
small print in the white of the page

- "small print," daphne marlatt