Barbaras reads Merleau-Ponty as wanting "to reestablish the experience itself of ideality" (Being, p. 235). He says further, "The fidelity to experience, to which the dialectic of the visible and invisible bears witness, imposes the recognition of the intelligible as a specific experience; that is, the fidelity of experience imposes that we distinguish ideality in the strict sense from the 'ideas' that are inscribed within the heart of the sensible" (p. 236).
The irrealization of experience absent any magistral discursive function (though not deposed of all possibilities for learning), which is to say experience on an equal footing with the experience of itself, exposes variation as an element inscribed within the experiential. I want to interpret experience as it is experienced, yet I read variation into experience by the very ideation that brings it to consciousness. It appears equally true that variation was already "there" within experience as a condition for reading anything at all into experience, into indicating a movement between an experience and its other. Fidelity to whyless variation—chaosmic, spasmoreal whyless variation—is a requirement of fidelity to experience. Plurality emerges more or less suddenly in tandem with experience, which is the source of the difficulty in saying definitively "experience means p," or "experience means q."
Perhaps on a note of tension, then, I share with you Barbaras' statement that "the sensible already carries within it the entire destiny of meanings, but in it meaning remains opaque and allusive" (p. 237). Meaning doesn't stand still except by allusion. At best it sometimes plays alongside remaining in place. In its original form meaning precisely and almost at once not entirely departs. Remaining is a departure of meaning.
I quote a paragraph from Merleau-Ponty's "The Philosopher and his Shadow" (in Signs) on the topic of epoché as the essence of inquiry. I'll return to the essay in a later post. The idea I want to play with here is how inquiry, any inquiry, draws the person of the inquirer into question in a movement like a return to self. What does inquiry look like once we continue to interrogate this reentry into the self?
Take for example the theme of phenomenological reduction, which we know never ceased to be an enigmatic possibility for Husserl, and one he always came back to. To say that he never succeeded in ensuring the bases of phenomenology would be to be mistaken about what he was looking for. The problems of reduction are not for him a prior step or preface to phenomenology; they are the beginning of inquiry. In a sense, they are inquiry, since inquiry is, as he said, a continuous beginning. We must not imagine Husserl hamstrung here by vexatious obstacles; locating obstacles is the very meaning of his inquiry. One of its "results" is the realization that the movement of return to ourselves–of "re-entering ourselves," St. Augustine said–is as if rent by an inverse movement which it elicits. Husserl rediscovers that identity of "re-entering self" and "going-outside self" which, for Hegel, defined the absolute. To reflect (Husserl said in Ideen I) is to unveil an unreflected dimension which is at a distance because we are no longer it in a naive way, yet which we cannot doubt that reflection attains, since it is through reflection itself that we have an idea of it. So it is not the unreflected which challenges reflection; it is reflection which challenges itself. For by definition its attempt to revive, possess, internalize, or make immanent has meaning only with respect to an already given terminus which withdraws into its transcendence beneath the very gaze which has set out in search of it in this attempt.
("Shadow," p. 161, Merleau-Ponty's emphases)
Let's suppose reentry into the self elicits an ecstasy, a coming outside the self. Do we reenter the same self we remember being inside–for surely we do remember something like being inside the self or it would make no sense to speak of "reentry" in place of entry. Can we see that from an ecstatic perspective? Let's question the continuity of reentrances. Could we sense a memory of estrangement called up by reentry? Or is estrangement a feeling we have about ecstasies, memories of ecstasies. A mood is set by reentry and far more. In saying "reentry" we have imagined a whole person, a person with a depth of history, memories, forgetfulness, an eventful world, feelings, imagination, style. Such repleteness may tell us something critical about inquiry itself. Nevertheless, have we not also created an obstacle to inquiry? Can the reentered self be questioned on the same grounds as the self that would have existed prior to any reentry, a personalistic self, perhaps; or does reentry call for a new logos, a newly entered conversation, one that recognizes the singularity of the person quite apart from any totalizing scheme? Do we find a malleated self at the horizon of reentry, its malleations possibly effected by reentry, or are we faced with the malleations of an image of self, the work of an imagination that might be mistaken for continuous were it not for its slips into ecstasy? I don't propose here that the imagination slips into ecstacy alone, although one can of course imagine a reduction to solitude and its vexations; I only mean to say that a philosophy of the imagination is not necessarily a philosophy of mind, in the sense that Merleau-Ponty gives that term in his reading of Husserl.
Montiglio interprets Pindar's poetics, supplying some broad thoughts about the materiality of sound according to the ancients. "Poetry is a sonorisation of the silent mind, and its coming to being depends on a restless movement of the vocal organ" (Silence, p. 95, her emphasis). And, worth noting in passing: "Reading out loud is a metaphor for both the execution and the composition of the poem. It is only through this reading that poetry comes to exist. Mental writing does not produce a nonrecited poem" (p. 94). Liquid sounds. Dramatic sounds. Sounds too powerful to be human. Did silence ever call to be animated? Somewhere a poem slips out of existence, into the silences that never give birth to conversation. Not even rereadings let us escape oblivion indefinitely. The poem knows that. Every poem secretly knows that. "The 'liquidity' of song, which takes us back to its oral origins, favors a thorough diffusion of the poet's voice"(p. 98). This would be a thespian voice, a persona attached to an arc ever near completion, the figure of sonorous presence, approximating total presence–cut down by skop as foretold. The voice of the ancient poet, though, is it not the voice of a rereading? "The voice of the Muses, which engages other voices in a contrapuntal response, seems to have the same capacity of spatial diffusion as the light; it is as tireless as the rays of the sun and spreads like dawn on the sea; it makes itself heard everywhere"(p. 97). Rereading is the silence of the said, or, better, it insists on the silence of the said, reads it aloud so as to put it to sleep, exactly a lullaby. The polyphonization of the unsaid, the said's remainder, rests on this sleep of the said within the rereading. What does the page symbolize amidst such tireless conversation? It too must be reread, polyphonized along with the rest of the unsaid. Symbolize?
Since the experience of poetry, in an aural culture, consists in the hic et nunc of its performance, the real or imaginary listener who wants to describe it follows the movements of its musical unfolding, just as we would describe a symphony following the succession of its resonances. Sappho seems indeed to be reproducing the many instrumental and vocal components of a true symphony, the subject matter of which is only mentioned at the end.
(p. 97)
Imagine a word too powerful to be human. Don't we do this all the time? Symphony, aural, resume, the silent mind. Imagine what it would take to voice such words, and only such words. To voice discretely, and only with the voice, the voice itself. Never happen. (Let "the vocal organ" be a metaphor for its never happening.) We call upon other voices–as if to converse? The experience of poetry has always been like hanging out with the daughters of Mnemosyne, the way we used to, when it rained. Would our aural materialism propose to explain away the touch of Terpsichore and her siblings, or her symbol? Unstring the Canon of the Nine? Step lightly, dear imaginary listener, in your interpretation of the boundlessness of musical voices, a boundlessness that coexists with the silent mind. The silent mind is a wild animal. The excursion of the poem means not to tame. Nor to bewilder. We are coming closer to saying what it means for the silent mind to stand for a material cause–the meontic efficiency of the symbol, incidentally, is nowhere near that of the ordinary sign. Do you suppose there is some balance to be struck between silence and restlessness?
Lagoon.Tortoise.Lagoon.
I threw myself at the shores of your tongue, restless you. What solace was there in sweet centuries we spoke them too. And we stole the silence of the said from the public library, its bright corners, musics, ours and Sappho's, who seemed never to have learned how to die, but fragment, fragment. . . taught us words like mythoplokos.
Scarry asks us to imagine a face. "It may seem than in shifting from the motion of skating to the motion of smiling, we have veered away from the subject of circles, but we have not, for when the face breaks into a smile, the mouth moves into a small upward opening arc" (Dreaming, p. 208). Levinas asks us to imagine a face that would break through the image of the face, a face that would appear above and beyond phenomenality. This metaphysical face that transcends appearances is a face that speaks.
To speak to me is at each moment to surmount what is necessarily plastic in manifestation. To manifest oneself as a face is to impose oneself above and beyond the manifested and purely phenomenal form, to present oneself in a mode irreducible to manifestation, the very straightforwardness of the face to face, without the intermediary of the image, in one's nudity, that is, in one's destitution and hunger.
(Totality, p. 200, Levinas' emphasis)
If we could ever turn off the imagination, everpresent as life, we might be able to discern whether faces ever appeared without touching on images. The imageless appearance perplexes. Perhaps, however, it is intermediacy rather than the image per se that has vexed us so. What appears to be a phenomenon of the persistence of images may be an aspect of intermediacies, in which case we might prefer to approach an understanding of living with images, their betweens and their middles, before thinking we know what an image does to the point where we could identify appearances that weren't images.
I imagine the face of the beloved. Images appear. That much makes sense. Are appearances irreal? Is the face of the beloved any less a real face for appearing as an image to me? Well, it is not the face of the beloved until it speaks to me and breaks through its image? How long does that last? Are there pauses in conversation? Perhaps a mistake has been made by Levinas in isolating a purely phenomenal form. How many images in life are purely phenomenal forms? My ruminations on the imagination have led me towards the idea that the imagination, rather than being an activity I can easily start and stop at will, by a process that might generate purely phenomenal forms, is instead integral to my life at every moment. Its rhythm doesn't belong to the will in any unscrutinized sense of that idea. My imagination surrounds the spoken, interweaves, intermediates. Has enough been said about the betweens of the said, or the betweens of the said and the unsaid?
"The Illiad," Scarry says (Dreaming, p. 202), "illustrates the observation made by Democritus and Plato that circles move easily in the mind, so easily that at times they seem the very shape of the mind itself." Circular movements come easily to the hominid imagination insofar as the hominid both understands movement directly and has the ability to move in circular fashion. The hominid gross anatomy, marked by some distinctive synovial joints, opens up possibilities of circular movement that are less expressed, one might say less emancipated, in other apes, though it almost goes without saying that all apes have interesting ball-and-socket joints. Naturally, positing a spherical shape of the mind hardly contradicts the observation that hominids make circular movements rather easily. However, I suggest that the mode of relation between joints and spherical images is not mimetic but methectic. Psyche does not reproduce its hidden image before itself in various modes but rather enacts its image in the modes it grows accustomed to, and possibly more. It participates in its own image. The extent to which the shape of the psyche is an habituation can be overstressed, but I find it worth noting anyway.
Barbaras interprets Merleau-Ponty's grappling with the experience of the other: "the other is a being who is present only as absent, is given only as its own withdrawal, and, because of that is not given to a consciousness. The experience of the other is, par excellence, the 'presentation of the unpresentable'" (Being of the Phenomenon, p. 40). The paradoxes bother me. Perhaps they were already latent within the phenomena of coexistence and did not arise as the result of a philosophical error such as the entification of experience. I say that cautiously, not least because of my own inclinations to entify experience. In fact the "not given to a consciousness" of the other is not easily interpreted. Does "consciousness" mean primarily "self-relation," as Barbaras says at one point? Does it mean specifically a being capable of forming or having an experience? Does it primarily mean an insular subjectivity?
The other appears as such, and, to this extent, its givenness does not refer to an insular consciousness; however, if the relation to the other were based truly on an anonymous subjectivity, it would lose all meaning because there would be no distinction within this anonymity, that is, because finally there would be no consciousness to which the other could appear. The ego and the alter ego have parallel destinies: the moment the ego vanishes into the anonymity of being-in-the-world, the other undergoes the same fate and stops being other because it is not a consciousness. Just when the experience of the other appears possible, since the abyss between insular subjectivities can be bridged, the experience loses all meaning, for along with their differences, the consciousnesses themselves disappear. Alterity and egoity are not opposed. On the contrary, because a consciousness is endowed with identity, because it is self-consciousness, it can be other, that is, differ from an other. Therefore, if the relation to the other excludes self-transparent consciousnesses, the relation also challenges the idea of an undifferentiated psychic current–only a consciousness, a self-relation, can engender a difference, a divergence in the heart of this current. The move critical of Husserl's egology, which is based on the discovery of the [wild] anonymity of being-in-the-world and which eventually converges with Scheler's perspective, calls now for an opposite move that leads to a revindication of one of Husserl's truths against Scheler. The existence of the other makes sense only insofar as it is reconceived from the viewpoint of an ego, to which it can appear and from which it can be distinguished as an alter ego. At this point, the problem is posed in a way that conforms to all the dimensions of the experience. There is certainly an originary anonymity, but this anonymity must at the same time be rejected since it is experienced and consequently divided up by the consciousnesses which are fused in it. There is, then, a solipsism which cannot be overcome, and yet this solipsism must also be rejected, since the experience that consciousness has of its solitude presupposes a prior background of communication with the other. In fact, the solitude of consciousness is the experience of the absence of others, and it refers consequently to an originary relation with them against whose background this absence can be experienced as such. All absence is a modality of presence.
(pp. 35-36)
Would the withdrawal of the other from owned phenomenality follow the same path as the withdrawal of the imaginary from the real? Is there anything to this withdrawal besides withdrawal? Anything like a habitus? Anything like an eidos of experience, even an unthinkable eidos, one that appears only in withdrawing from thought? Is ideation thought in every possible sense? What is my image of phenomenality?
The other appears; its transcendence, therefore, could not correspond to the factual presence of something transcendent. But it appears in such a way as not to give itself in this appearing; it remains transcendent to its givenness. Or rather, it gives itself as this very transcendence. It is precisely the presence of a non-presence. This claim does not mean that the other's absence conceals another presence–that would be to fall back into the aporias of objective thought and to look for the signs of a consciousness in a corporeal presence–it means instead that the other presents itself as absent, that manifestation and withdrawal are identical in it.
(pp. 25-26)
Is it ever the case that another person gives herself against the background of originary solitude (as the transcendence of her givenness)? What makes this thought nearly unimaginable? A thought that belongs to solitude, the exile within, exiled even from ownness.
I question correlations between desire and the addressee of the question, I question desire, and, as much as I'd agree that the question's addressee is a necessary condition for there being a question, I question the addressee's presence, his mode of spatiotemporal persistence, or givenness. Here's Levinas:
[T]he question that asks about the quiddity is put to someone. He who is to respond has long already presented himself, responding thus to a question prior to every question in search of quiddities. In fact the "who is it?" is not a question and is not satisfied by a knowing [hmm, FtY]. He to whom the question is put has already presented himself, without being a content. He has presented himself as a face. The face is not a modality of quiddity, an answer to a question, but the correlative of what is prior to every question. What is prior to every question is not in its turn a question nor a knowledge possessed a priori, but is Desire. The who correlative of Desire, the who to whom the question is put, is, in metaphysics, a "notion" as fundamental and as universal as quiddity and being and the existent and the categories.
(Totality, p. 177, Levinas' emphasis)
Because of the relationship with the Other, the ethical relation, man can know the difference between being and phenomenon and recognize his own phenomenality (pp. 179-180). Could this ethical relation form in response to a question, even a question that would not be satisfied by a knowing? Does any kind of ethical relation logically follow from the question who? On the other hand, by asking who? we presuppose an ethical relation. Was it really there waiting for us already? Did it not need to be welcomed, following on the welcoming of a who?
The face I welcome makes me pass from phenomenon to being in another sense: in discourse I expose myself to the questioning of the Other, and this urgency of the response–acuteness of the present–engenders for me responsibility; as responsible I am brought to my final reality. This extreme attention does not actualize what was in potency, for it is not conceivable without the other. Being attentive signifies a surplus of consciousness, and presupposes the call of the other.
(p. 178)
Let's return, with no overriding sense of urgency, to the question of the question prior to the question. Of course it can't really be a question just yet, as an a priori. It's first questionality is imaginary. It begins to resemble/by resembling an imaginary question. Thus we've been made aware of the phenomenality of the question, perhaps especially the first question. How then can we begin to separate what the imagination brings from what the Other brings to the question? Imagination as other, Other as imaginary: "The phenomenon is the being that appears, but remains absent" (p. 181). Imaginary phenomenality. Do we recognize the phenomenality of the ethical self–by which I only mean the other of the other, or, to move towards a definition, one who listens to the call of the other–in the same manner that we recognize the phenomenality of the quiddity? Are all phenomenalities put together the same way? The key to Levinas' thinking here seems to be the remaining absent of the being that appears, and this would seem to have something to do with desire. Should I desire to transcend phenomenality? Now, if I say that in my experience there are temporary absences, or intermittent absences, that I become inured to temporary absences, does this say nothing about phenomenality, which presumably has to do with permanent absence? I don't actually know that I will always be able to reformulate the first question at will, or at the suggestion of the other. Questioning could fall apart. Why would we want to imagine a questioning that could never fall apart? (A question that would resemble being impervious to time, a questionee who was always and never there?) Would that be logical?
Write your names in the sand. Listen to the tide roll in. Scarry says "the imagination, with its latticework of incompletely pictured elements, has within it both the actually imagined and the only-almost-imagined, the not-quite-imagined, and the not-yet-imagined" (Dreaming, p. 179). She goes on to say that imagination "magnifies its own work through negation and abstention. This is the way the imagination reflects on itself and becomes self-knowing" (ibid.). Imagine knowing yourself through your irrealizations, an image of yourself at the beach. Sketch a meontic portrait of yourself lost in imagination, as one might be lost in thought. Is it like being lost? Does this self that you imagine have any real consistency, such that it could ever be lost? Could we fully imagine being lost without the possibility of there ever having been a found? Why fully? Aren't we committing to irreality by asking that the imagination be fully itself when it so clearly resists fullness? The found of the lost may have yet to be imagined–one could wait an eternity, were eternity available for waiting. Only almost eternity, like the ocean. The image of the irrealizing self is the negative of the realizing self? No, the real problem is to imagine knowing. What would knowing be that didn't know the lost, that had no room for the lost, nothing to say about the lost?
Scarry's tremendous thinking about the image, which recognizes the body's work (especially the work of the hand) in making and manipulating images, prompts me to revisit the imaginary question. If the image is artefactual as Scarry asks us to acknowledge (Dreaming, p. 149), if it is in some important respect a creation of the hand, then would the discovery of the hand's movements in the posing of the imaginary question tell us anything about the question, either the question itself or the question as it is posed (assuming there could possibly be a difference), or would it simply be by virtue of being imagined that the question becomes manipulatable? Is posing a question, any question, the job of the imagination?
Conceptualize a somatic methexis of the question, an existential, improvisatory engagement with the query, the en-quiry in its fullest sense as a putting oneself, not merely an understanding which could be disembodied, but a replete bodily understanding (understanding body), at serious risk. Where would we look for signs of the somaticity of this methexis? Here's Scarry reporting on the hand's closeness to the image:
[R]ecent work on mental imaging in cognitive psychology has shown that the part of the brain at work when one thinks of a handmade object (a chisel, a dollhouse, a house) is not the same as when one thinks about a nonhandmade object (a stone, a shell). It also turns out that the part of the brain engaged in thinking about handmade objects is the region engaged in thinking about motion. It may also be that our thinking about handmade objects magnifies our sense of human agency, thereby increasing our ability to make mental images move.
(p. 146)
If we think about the question as a handmade object, even more specifically as something for the hand, if not a tool, then like a tool, something to get a handle on, do we risk deluding ourselves about the essential nature of the question, confusing the shaped opening of discourse, the door of the habitation of language, with the open wonder or, alternatively, the free impulse to evocation, the celebration of the responsivity of speech that is the question. Furthermore, then, could the experts of questioning–philosophers of some ilks might qualify–be more deluded than the question's laity, misled by the thinking suggested by their own practices? (I have previously suggested a naturalism of the question; this too would have something of the handmade about it.) Consider the following observation about how dancers imagine movement, which, though I have known only a handful of trained dancers, strikes me as being on target: "one may, like a dancer, feel the stir of the imagined action across one's whole stationary body" (p. 148).
Let's think about reading for a moment, an activity that is near and dear to me, and perhaps others who regularily pose questions and think about questions. As Scarry thinks about how the gestures of the hand inform certain manipulations of the image, such as stretching, folding and tilting, she notices a parallel with the activity of reading. "Reaching, stretching, and folding are the actual motions the hand carries out–like a spell of hand motions performed over the book–as one reads"(p. 147). Like a spell of hand motions. We flirt with magical thinking, for the most part this morning contagious magic rather than sympathetic magic, but the ascertainment of any magic impinging upon the question would be remarkable. Do we free ourselves of magical thinking about the question, or do we discern the magical in our thinking on the way to discerning what is magical about the question? Is "magical thinking" a negative image of praktognosis? Is literate magic radically different from oral magic?
Can we learn anything about the lability of the question from thinking about the lability of images? Emily Brontë's "hand exercises" serve to "make the image more labile by calling attention to its malleability" (p. 127). (Lability and malleability are not in fact synonymous; lability refers to wandering, erring, or even slipping, lapsing, whereas malleability simply means one can beat it with a hammer–well, this is a question. Do we first find the image malleable or already malleated (which wouldn't rule out further malleations)? Perhaps the question, if we attend to it in its habitation, tells us something about certain malleabilities of speech at the same time it also mirrors, either in its very malleiformity or in its contagious belonging to speech, malleability, or, better, malleaticities of the imaginary.) Flexousness: a wonderful word Scarry borrows from Hardy. Lability depends upon the flexousness of the moving body, the moving person as Scarry rightly says (pp. 155-156). Now, in our imaginations, can we ever completely dematerialize the moving person? I'd like to avoid reducing the imaginary question to a question of its inflection, while still refusing to ignore its inflection insofar as it's put out there with questioning. More broadly, then, in what sense does the imaginary dematerialize the question? In the final analysis what do we know about the materiality of the moving person? Oh, to be sure, the imaginary questioner (or the formulator of the imaginary question, if we must) is a person who moves; however, it's the malleaticity of the image which bathes the imaginary in the material, or requires us to recognize something like material–not just any material, though. We are speaking of technology, stuff made by hand, or even, at the same time, made for the hand. Conceivably rather than the moving imparting its materiality to the malleable, the malleable exists as a material resistance to the movements of the body of uncertain materiality. This is a question for future inquiries, as is the echo of locomotion (lability) in the hominid hand, the very hand that formulates the imaginary question.
"A phrase like 'wave on shrieking wave,'" Scarry says, "requires that we picture a wave, let it for a split second disappear, then bring the picture back: in effect, we make the wave image pulse" (Dreaming by the Book, p. 102). If the process we use to imagine moving images differs from the process we use to put still images into motion then we should question how it is in both cases we're talking about the same imaginative faculty rather than, at most, a constellation of various imaginative activities and skills, activities touching on or drawing from the imagination without themselves being the imagination. I'd like to explore this question from another angle.
Close your eyes. Remember being at the coast. Remember the sound of the waves. Picture the night. Your eyes are closed. In your memory your eyes are closed. You hear the pulse of the ocean. It's the sound of intimacy. It draws you in, the sound. Wave upon wave, the sound of the ocean.
Now think about what you are doing. Are you imagining a memory or an episode of imagination? Perhaps you're experiencing a moment akin to a dream. Are there several moments wrapped into one? More than one memory? More than one sound in your mind? Is the sound of the ocean one sound or many? Does the word "pulse" make it easier to imagine the sound of the ocean? Does it distract by introducing other images? Does it entail any process beyond imagination, or is it best understood as a refinement of imagination? Is flirting with metaphor one of things imagination does, or does such flirtation belong to language–as if the imaginative exercise of language could be rigorously separated from the imaginative play of fantasy; well, it's a theory that can't be totally ignored in the critique of imagination. We shape our images, give them to be shaped, we give our plasticity over to words, which theoretically means other people's words and to large measure other people's meanings and other people's images. We surrender our imaginations, even our imaginative faculties, for a time at least. We lapse into language, its powers to stir images, or steer them. This lapse, this surrender, is entirely distinct from the giving of the imagination over to fantasy, so much so that one should question whether the same faculty is involved in both instances. This doesn't seem altogether likely to me, but perhaps it helps us appreciate what Scarry is doing in demonstrating how literary techniques help us imagine more vividly than we might were we left to our own devices. Language can juice the imagination or something awfully similar to the imagination because it is itself an activity of the imagination.
I surrender to dark images, unsure of whether they belong in the same category as light images. I am enthralled by the sound of the word "pulse," its explosion of liquid sibilance, its pulse.
Language in the dark, like the imagination, becomes oceanic. From one perspective imagination begins in the moment when memory is cast adrift–the transition between waves abrupt–crashes woven into a single moment, an oceanic moment, a pulse.
Scarry riffs on the Homeric phrase "he hurled and his spear's long shadow flew":
The iteration suggests that the line is an epic formula, and we sometimes speak dismissively of formulaic lines. But its being a formula means that it was singled out as a way the movement of the heavy spear could be vividly pictured. Such a formula, in other words, gives us a record of the conclusions that the ancient world reached about mental life, about the way a mental event inside a person's mind can be prompted by a particular instruction. Furthermore, recomposition–the direction to remake a picture that we have already successfully made in the past–is, as we shall see, an important practice not only in the Iliad but in most works of the imagination: our third of fourth production of a given image is likely to be accomplished with less mental struggle and with greater vivacity. Poems and novels exist to be reread many times, but, even within a single reading, we are often called upon rapidly to reassemble images whose initial making required great labor.
(Dreaming by the Book, p. 94, my emphasis)
The idea that repeated images are more vivacious than initial images asks to be put to the test. In my experiment I chose to reimagine Pegasus' mane–perhaps knowing in the back of my mind that my imaginings of Pegasus have been more lively and mobile than Scarry would give a person credit for–to keep to the theme of recomposition. I was surprised to discover that my reimagining was indeed more vivid than I remembered the previous imagining being. (Can I trust my memory here?) However, the reason for this vividness may have nothing to do with the quality of rarity Scarry discusses. There is nothing shadowy or gossamer about Pegasus' mane. In fact it is coarse. There are tangles, tangles I never noticed before. It even smells tangled and coarse. Can this really be the same mane I ran my fingers through last October? If not, or if we are unsure, then we shouldn't ascribe the vivacity of the present imagery to an effect of repetition. Perhaps the reenacted image borrows its vivacity from newness because it has none of its own. Perhaps vivacity is always a recomposition, a movement defined not merely passively by its departure from demise or memory, but orchestrated in order to definitively put memory behind it because memory won't stay put on its own. Or, perhaps, Scarry has it exactly right.
Intimation of the shape of another person, the dialogue begun by the fading out of the image, intervals required for addressivity, drive, relating the intervalic eidos of the imaginary to an eidos of living: all to come.
Scarry says the verbal arts are both counterfactual and counterfictional, by which term she means that they "displac[e] the ordinary attributes of imagining–its faintness, two-dimensionality, fleetingness and dependence on volitional labor–with the vivacity, solidity, persistence, and givenness of the perceptible world" (Dreaming, p. 38). To describe something as fading away is already to imply an additional dimension beyond any imagined purely atemporal, unmoving spatial dimensions. A quibble? Well, I'm concerned that the imaginary is being defined here in opposition to a perceptual that is not true to experience and consequently the imaginary is being mischaracterized. The temporality of the imaginary asks to be carefully interpreted, because on its face the mere existence of a lived time of the imaginary implies a continuity between imagination and perception, a continuity which has been called into question by the very idea of the imaginary. That images fade away is a sign that there is life in the imaginary, some ground for the experience of the tremor. Yet vivacity is neither permanently affixed to persistence nor severed from spontaneity (nor even an awareness of spontaneity)–to what extent perseverance persists in perseveration is a question we shall return to in some form–but swinging. Vivacity is not the leap itself but the oscillation between the leap and the faint. If you remove the faint from vivacity it's as good as dead. It becomes a dead impulse.
What do we say of the vivacity of an impulse to recur? The recurring dream, Scarry suggests, becomes troubling because "its sheer persistence. . . itself seems to contain a claim of reality" (p. 34). Although so far we have only talked about the swings of vivacity and haven't taken the position that vivacity has absolutely no relation to persistence, we must ask now whether claims to reality must divorce themselves from vivacity. If you say of course not then do you, faced with the persistence of the faint and the fading, admit to some troubles? What troubles you about idées fixes? Are you troubled by their faintness–or do they rather testify to a trouble with faintness? If reality can be claimed any number of times then perhaps reality cannot be claimed at all. I can say such a prospect doesn't trouble me, but I allow that I may have resigned myself to a troubled existence, to a certain kind of irreal life. The real is something I imagine as pantamorphic. The pantamorphic on its face recuperates the beat of naissance, the inchoate rhythm, however, the pantamorphic imaginary may hide a way of rationalizing deformity. That may be its sole purpose. Yet which would be the reality we don't want to face? Life may be more troubling to us than death, more disfiguring, more perseverant–on point, vivacity in particular designates a tenacity in living, or a tenacious spirit, and although it connotes enjoyment of life, it reveals a need to affirm life, a need which for its part betokens disturbance. The imagination trembles.
Elaine Scarry's Dreaming by the Book promises to be a good read. She has done her research. She writes well. She thinks formidably. I'll surely enjoy critically engaging with this text.
Does poetry speak to us of a tacit dimension of language? If there is a special case of language called poetry, a genre distinct from others that we can isolate and consider separately from our investigations of language, does it yet tell us of a reality, a vivid reality, of all speech and its house, language? My prejudice is clear. I am surrounded by poetry–but perhaps I delude myself. By no stretch am I an expert on what constitutes poetry.
While Scarry holds that "imaginary vivacity comes about by reproducing the deep structure of perception" (p. 9), I suggest that poetic juice flows from the chthonic prosody of all tongues, iteratively one imagines. Assonance and consonance are the stuff of Scarry's prose. Perhaps also her thoughts. However, she claims that "verbal art. . . .has no acoustical features" (p. 5, her emphasis). Can it be said without controversy that verbal art (in the limited sense in which Scarry defines it) has no acoustical features but it echos the spoken word? The idea may be backwards and upsidedown too. Scarry defines poetry (apparently deciding for us that the model for all poetry must be written) as a "sequence of printed signs [which] contains a set of instructions for the production of actual sound; the page itself does not sing but exists forever on the verge of song" (p. 7). Poetic language does not echo the spoken word but formulates it. It presages. Obviously text is a possibility of language, as a way of irrealizing speech. Are any traces of this possibility already inscribed in the spoken word? What about possibilities for following instructions?
Dreams. What happens to the spoken word in dreams? Is the word in dreams interpreted through hearing? Does the prosody of a sequence of dream words have no acoustical features? Are these words merely submerged?
One reason I have for keeping Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis at arm's length is a feeling that rhythms, all rhythm, may be imaginary. Is keeping one's balance a work of the imagination? In a way. That's a sense I'm giving to the word imaginary, a sense which is not merely broad, but means something like "created by sentient existentialities, perhaps involving some kind of metamorphosis, or an involved projection of sentient energy into the forms of the world." Dance could be an image of rhythm. Alternatively I could say rhythm itself is essentially proprioceptive, and proprioceptive feelings are constituted if that helps get across my drift. (I'm not sure I really want to make that claim, restricting the genesis of rhythm to one sense, although it may be a doorway to understanding the essence of the phenomenon.) Here we're up before dawn in our philosophical understanding of rhythms. Is there an internal rhythmic concsiousness? Must we assume rhythm in order to analyze rhythms. If so, how do we choose which concepts to align with our concept of rhythm? Does it align with the real or the irreal, the objective or the subjective or, to deploy a meronym, the intersubjective? Is rhythm the meronym of the continuous and the discontinuous or does it exist by itself? If we align rhythm with physis (or kinesis, in a similar move), doesn't experience along with empirical data brought to our attention compel us to admit that rhythms are many, and that therefore our concept of rhythm can never be more than approximation of any phenomenon of rhythm, and may well be wide of the mark in many instances? Must we be able to step into and step out of rhythm in order to know that rhythm exists? I wouldn't rush to chalk up such an ability to having an idea of rhythm, but if it exists and must exist prior to any hermeneutics of rhythm it must be analyzed, elicited, interpreted, heard, played with or discussed in some fashion. Speaking of the image of rhythm is my attempt to do that.
I turn the floor over to Lefebvre, who asks us to distinguish between the present and presence. (Please note that his idea of the imaginary appears to be more in keeping with an idea of representation than mine is.)
Its name tells as much, but the meanings of words fade over time. The present offers itself in all innocence and cruelty: open, evident, here and there. It can wear a smile, or be tinged with melancholy, provoke tears. But this evidence is misleading, fabricated. It is an adulterated product that simulates presence as a forgery imitates a fact of nature, fruit, a flower, etc. A kind of (dissimulating) simulator of the present: the image!
If you take it for what it is (a paint-daubed or coloured scrap of paper), it falls short of its goal. If you take it for what it seeks to evoke, it accomplishes it. You have to 'have confidence' in the photo, painting, drawing. It has become a sort of social, also known as aesthetic (not moral), obligation that gives rise to abuse. But if you have the ability to take the flows and the streams (T.V., the press, etc.) as rhythms among others, you avoid the trap of the present that gives itself as presence and seeks the effects of presences. The latter are the facts of both nature and culture, at the same time sensible, affective and moral rather than imaginary.
Through a kind of magic, images change what they reach (and claim to reproduce) into things, and presence into simulacra, the present, the this. Do speech and exorcism exist? Yes. Nothing is more simple: a child could do it. Necessarily, a gesture suffices: to take images for what they are, simulacra, copies conforming to a standard, parodies of presence.
The rhythmanalyst will give an account of this relation between the present and presence: between their rhythms. A dialectical relation: neither incompatibility, nor identity–neither exclusion nor inclusion. One calls the other, substitutes itself for this other. The present sometimes imitates (simulates) to the point of mistaking itself for presence: a portrait, a copy, a double, a facsimile, etc., but (a) presence survives and imposes itself by introducing a rhythm (a time). The act of rhythmanalysis [le geste rhythmanalytique] transforms everything into presences, including the present, grasped and perceived as such. The act [geste] does not imprison itself in the ideology of the thing. It perceives the thing in the proximity of the present, an instance of the present, just as the image is another instance. Thus the thing makes itself present but not presence. On the contrary, the act of rhythmanalysis integrates these things–this wall, this table, these trees–in a dramatic becoming, in an ensemble full of meaning, transforming them no longer into diverse things, but into presences.
If the open domain is logically possible it must be possible in a paradoxical though intelligible sense in which making a home (domum), a mode of enclosure, also means making an opening. Perhaps that what's intended in the expression, an oxymoron with just a soupçon of impossibility. The truth is though I don't know what possibility means, especially as its distinguished from potentiality, as Whitehead does, for example. None of my suspicions about possibility seem to match what others say about it. I put the concept on hold. As I like to say to myself, I'm open to what it could mean. At the moment possibility appears to me as something that would have to be imagined, like the open domain, perhaps. It is a fantasy idea, one of many fantasy ideas that wanders through the open domain wherein I read Casey's Imagining. Or possibility is a gesture. Perhaps I should allow it that much, that it could be offered in the interests of dialogue.
What is the milieu of the imagination, the polyskoppic power, the "organ of metamorphosis," Marie Antoinette of the faculties, winged prophet of the iconoclasm, mother of all possibilities? I'm being playful but take the question as seriously as you will. Like Casey to some extent I recognize that the imagination variegates and divagates. There's something multilocular about the whole affair. Surely Casey is right in that respect. However, I am in no rush to equate the many places of the imagination with pure possibility or any such idea. Please, allow me to loiter. What are the milieux of the imagination's vagrancies?
I am not convinced that the autonomy of the imagination is in evidence. I cannot so easily isolate my imaginings from thought, dream, fantasy, memory, culture, myth, symbol, archetype, much less assert its dominion or its rule, its something-archy. Is this not animated by a mythos, this "finding" of mine that the divagations of the imagination are not completely contained within any autonomous region? Does mythopoesis need to be obliterative in order to function, to open a domain, to push other animations aside? Does it need to obliterate the traces of its own mythos? Whether or not in practice the mythopoets call for obliterations, implicitly or otherwise, I am not persuaded of their necessity. Obliterations could be owned. This is a possibility.
It was the snow that drew me in under the trefoil neon illuminations on Nevada Avenue, or the shelter from the snow that drove me in. An apostate from repetition. An enigmatic thought that equivocation might only be possible on the basis of a surreptition. A clear thought. No. Vestibulary thoughts. Between the perpetual and the maginational I knew I was leaving something out, or turning things around all widdershins for some crazy reason. Was I seeking poetic closure? In any event my way was made inside.
The alfaqui told me that there are no chairs in the hypercathedral, the Cathedral of a Thousand and One Refuges, only doorways and aisles. For that reason it is also called the Cathedral of a Thousand and One Aisles. The clerics in the cathedral are well-versed in the archeology of perpetual flights. They study the pigeons several hours a day, the alfaqui assured me. "All the doors here are in the vernacular," he added. He didn't look like the type who would intentionally deceive.
The alfaqui pointed me down the corridors towards the asymptotic doors. I passed through the corridors, and I never passed through the corridors. I was joined along the way by an epopt of the Ogival Mysteries.
"What have you witnessed?"
"We study the pigeons several hours a day," said the epopt. She pulled me aside into a zero-gravity intrados where no pigeons could be seen. She touched a voussoir with the palm of her hand, and it touched her. "This is the Cathedral of a Thousand and One Refuges," she explained.
"Can you tell me more?"
"The cyma reversa represents the union of the concave and the convex." She illustrated this with her hands.
"Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about" (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, No. 203).
"The way up and the way down is one and the same" (Heraclitus, DK 60).
When we follow a path do we follow an image of the path or do we feel the path directly without any mediation of the imagination? I mean our everyday experience of following a path. Although we are able to immediately feel something that could be called a path, provisionally, awareness of such immediate feelings tends to be extraordinary. We can cultivate divergence from the image of the path, just as we, in most cases without clear awareness, cultivate a convergence upon the image of the path. In either case perhaps we walk a path our imagination has laid out for us. (Yes, we can speak of not walking a path as irrealization of a(nother) path, as well as as an irrealization of walking a path, i.e. the path allows itself to be not-walked, or irreally walked, in multiple ways. Walking is a labyrinth of paths....) In a real and vibrant sense we walk in our imagination. Is this walking in our imagination a parallel walking, a walking that walks alongside actual walking? (Does such a parallelism–representation as such–only appear as an artefact of philosophical reflection, whereas in the raw walking and walking in our imagination are one?) Is this walking in our imagination what should be meant by saying "walking"? Or is it something else entirely? You tell me.
I'm of the opinion that mostly our abilities, the bulk of our abilities, are dormant. We don't feel the need to break paths, so we don't. Is sleep an ability? Should we be able to sleep our way into the breaking of a path? How else? What would lack of preparation have to do with breaking paths? Quick. Extemporize extemporization.
When we're following a path are we making good use of our imagination? Do we imagine in accordance with an image of the imagination? We should feel exhilarated by our imagination. Could it really be imagination itself that would keep us from feeling exhilarated by our imaginative exercises? Sometimes I realize that all my images are dull. That sucks.
"The way up and the way down is one and the same."
"Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about."
Imagination as metaphysics. More specifically I'd like to think for a second about imaginative possibilities, about a conceptual distinction between metaphysical possibility and actual possibility one could (possibly?) make, and about whether thinking about imagination together with the possible doesn't lift the veil on a metaphysical quality of imagination, whether indeed imagination isn't the quintessential engagement in metaphysics. The case is not as easy as it may appear. We might be justified in doubting whether to imagine is already to engage in metaphysics, and asking instead how imagination comes into metaphysics, if only we could reasonably see either its physical or actual manifestations. After all, imagination might also and primarily be a physics. The possibility can't be ruled out. The athlete Michael Phelps said, on winning his eighth gold medal in the 2008 Summer Olympics, "The biggest thing is nothing is impossible. With so many people saying it couldn't be done–all it takes is an imagination. That's something I learned that helped me." Should we doubt that his imagination helped him achieve his goals? Well, is this then a simple case of a metaphysical faculty or activity being subordinated to a physical goal? What if, on the other hand, metaphysical possibility has its origins in actual possibilities, in actual faculties and exercises of powers. The propositions need not be mutually exclusive–but we risk being led astray. Shouldn't we directly confront the question of whether imagination is a metaphysics?
Who wouldn't want to dwell in possibility? Perhaps we should be cautious of letting our thought be seduced by metaphysics, a realm that, seen for itself, may be just as enchanting as poetry. Before proceeding here allow me to state the obvious. Although I'm reading Casey's Imagining critically, I must say that in many regards he describes imagining quite well and in some instances precisely. He has undoubtedly contributed greatly to our understanding of the imagination and not incidentally of what it means to be human. That said, Casey disagrees with Collingwood's idea that "[t]he conceptions of past, future, the possible, the hypothetical are as meaningless for imagination as they are for feeling itself" (Principles of Art, p.224, in Imagining, p. 112). Well, I can't accept the reason Casey provides for his objection, namely that Collingwood overlooks the self-contained nature of imagination, a nature which is not at all obvious to me though I have read these passages six ways to Sunday. I rather suspect there may be good reason for distinguishing the making of an image, or letting an image be made, from something like metaphysical possibility, which, perhaps, could be more akin to a thought one has about thinking than a raw activity of thought, if that distinction makes any sense. If (the iffiest of ifs of course) pure possibility may characterize how the imagined object is posited by consciousness, then does it follow that "pure possibility is the distinctive thetic character of what we imagine and as such it serves to distinguish imaginative experience from other kinds of experience" (p. 116, my emphasis)? Perhaps at this point Phelps and Casey both agree that to imagine something is to posit an imaginary object and somehow make it appear. However, if Casey has succeeded in calling into question Sartre's idea of the irrealizing function of the imagination, he has not fully convinced me of either the thetic character of all imagination, or that there couldn't possibly be a deactivating gesture, or some other inactivity at the heart of imaginative activity–and here again is the problem of metaphysical possibility, which seems to appear whenever we move from action to what the action of the imagination requires in order to be an action, or, perhaps, whenever we attempt to think about action as action.
Let's look again at the former objection to Casey's conclusion, that is, the question of the thetic character of the image. It is decidedly not simply the case that everything that happens under the umbrella of the imagination can be characterized as a conscious act that posits something called an image. Think of possibility for a moment as a mood, the subjunctive. Imagination is hypotactic, hypotaxis par excellence. It whispers, always just shy of brushing up against the real–yet didn't Phelps really win his medals, and didn't Dickinson concretize the Gambrels of the Sky? The abiding image recurs, the recurrent image abides as a metaphysical problem–is it only because we have removed the act of finishing from the equation, because we are attempting to inhabit a terrain that could never be inhabited, to endure what could never be endured, these "moments of never"? I could be seduced right now by a ligature between the subjunctive and the question, lured into exploring how the road "about" the physical, necessarily beyond it and of it at once, leads to crossroads, and every crossroad is a question, or becomes an elaboration of the question of the road, aporias and metaphors–you would be right to wonder whether I hadn't gone astray. So I let Pegasus get the better of me. Isn't this also the way of imagination? Is there any imagination without enthusiasm, without craze. Crazy thought, the subjunctive–as if we could name it, rein it in, say that it, the craze, posits and we posit in one and the same sense, when it could be otherwise. As always, I leave these thoughts unfinished.
Open up your umbrellas to the giraffes and notice how they shimmer. What I call an imaginative experience is not the projection of a single image, or the production of a single image, but a moment of reverie composed of incalculable images and blurs between images, even blurs between manifestations of what appears to be the same image. To paraphrase Lyotard, I have a faith in the inexhaustibility of the imaginable. This is entwined in my being entwined in my imaginings, and when I talk about the experience of imagining this entwining is not to be excluded. But is this apodictic? Is there no doubt revealed in the shimmer? Is the shimmer of giraffes perhaps as close as we come to the image that would also be a question, or the imaginary question? Does the imaginary question have no presence? Does the shimmer? What can we say about the shimmer itself that would be descriptive of imagination, and not merely be an exercise in reflective analysis, a catching up that never quite made it, a learning that always asked for more unlearning? A rhythmic presence–not an oxymoron, but a description true to experience. And yet perhaps not true enough. A shimmer.
The memory of a pencil box, or is it a shoe box? A box of empty brown apothecary bottles. It is a shoe box, and it's the box of memories from Amélie, a borrowed memory. It was raining that night in Providence, going to the Cable Car. A rainy night at Cinema 21. Plum blossoms on Irving. They're umbrellas. Inside the umbrellas giraffe dioramas. Brilliant puddle mirror giraffescapes inside the umbrellas. Ossicones wiggle. A filmic palpability–and what is palpability after all? A rain shower? What is this experience I now have of having come in from a rain shower? A recurrence. It feels real, I can even bring myself to shiver, as if coming in from a rain shower were one of life's certainties.
The recurring image continues to be a problem. I question the idea that sameness is a prerequisite in order for there to be a continuity of imaginative acts. How does sameness come to be? I have feelings of imaginative continuity, cinematic sweeps from one tableau to the next, drawn out adumbrations of the image, intimations of a phantasmagoric continuum, explorable, alive, and I feel at times an uncanniness of the same, an unplacability of the recurrent image. Was the image current before it was almost (and thus never) settled as recurrent? The almost settled. The having come in from the rain smell. I will let my life define what is vivid, and what has depth. The image of having come in from the rain can be explored. Well, do we explore it as image, as memory, or as experience? I don't know that analyzing consciousness this way tells us anything. I don't know what to do at this point with an analysis that leads us away from the vividness or the realness of having come in from the rain, or the realness of phantasmagoric continuities, currents (isn't that leading away?). An open model, open to recurrence, naturally, but recursively open to the problem of the model. Could a consciousness without such an open model be capable of imagining at all? (So it does matter how we define imagination, how we analyze it.) Are images genuinely unexplorable?
