Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Historian Robin Kelley's Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original sets out to humanize Monk. We should question the image of the human that's being offered. In place of Mad Monk, Monk the childlike genius, images which Kelley is right to regard critically, Kelley presents us with an image of Monk the Revolutionary Worker. It makes one wonder whether there could be an intelligible biography that didn't traffic in cultural doxa, thereby assuming rather than demonstrating ways of life, a biography that, to stick to our current topic, didn't traffic in preformed images of the human, but rather arrested images, for a brief moment, spun them around, talked to them. Is it possibly in the nature of history to form an image of the human as we go along, we who are marked by historicity?
Myth, the bête noire of so many of our discourses, creeps in through the most improbable fissures. Is severe mental illness a fissure in the human?
Perhaps if the gods seem childlike it's because they don't accept their fates—naturally they do end up being who they are, but there's something both more than and less than fatal about the whole affair of coming to be a mythological figure, a simulacrum of fate that any message about fate must pass through. That's myth.
The image of the human generates its own inhuman, It stirs its own negative image from the depths of its mythos. But is that true? Doesn't the inhuman arise in the telling? And doesn't the human itself ask to be thought of as something more akin to story than to myth?
Labels: bios, historicity, Monk, myth, narrative, Robin Kelley
Monday, August 31, 2009
"Editing must come from the same inspired joy and abandon as free improvisation," says Nachmanovitch (Free Play, , p. 109).
The mYrror between the Olympian and the secretarial, a dionysiac hand exarate. The poet knows things like chiton, stylus, catoptron, morph, amphora. He says such things as if his words were butterflies. The poetical far surpasses the poet, such is the amphoricity of the poet's psyche, the bearing of its epiphanizations. What has been relinquished in order to give out giving? Breath? Earthly Breath.
Labels: breathing, daimon, improvisation, myth, Nachmanovitch, poetry
Friday, May 15, 2009
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.
Labels: causality, imagination, Montiglio, muses, myth, Pindar, poetry, Sappho, silence
Friday, January 23, 2009
Myth dissimulates time as it is actually lived, insofar as time itself isn't just a bag of moonshine, a concept whose time has come and gone with the tides. Perhaps we are compelled by circumstances to make of myth an instrument of doubt, to use it's transformative power over thought in order to pursue our inquiries undeterred by such stupidities as the Real or Finitude. You see, we are so wrapped up in myth it is to be doubted whether we can formulate a proper question, an emancipated question. We try to undo by the same means by which we've been done in. So who's up for a little abolition of time?
Loraux writes, "wrath in mourning, the principle of which is eternal repetition, willingly expresses itself with an aeí, and the fascination of this tireless "always" threatens to set it up as a powerful rival to the political aeí that establishes the memory of institutions" ("Of Amnesty and its Opposite," in Mothers in Mourning, p. 98). Loraux wants us to think about the cultural construction of mourning (one thinks of Danforth and Seremetakis, among others, though Loraux's work isn't an ethnography, obviously, and we might suspect the ethnographers of having their own narrative issues with time), yet I think maybe the mask has slipped and I can't help wondering about the thought behind "eternal repetition," a concept which can only be understood in mythic or dramatic terms. In a footnote Loraux adds that the aeí falls under Lyotard's category of "identical repetition" in which the mark is upon the speaker, in contrast to the "Jewish" sentence in which the mark is upon the addressee. Hmm.
If we can bring the impossible on stage, why not the brazenly contradictory? "[J]ust as mēˆnis, álaston expresses the atemporal duration, immobilized in a negative will, and immortalizing the past in the present" (p. 100). Her meaning is that forgetting is also positive, at least for the polis. We'll keep that in mind. But what a strange alignment of concepts! "Nonoblivion is all-powerful insofar as it has no limits–and especially not those of a subject's interiority" (p. 102). We are dealing here, allegorically in a certain light, with ritual mourning in ancient Greece, proscribed mourning, that is, mourning as it is written, which also means mourning as it is performed in the theatre. Loraux wants us to understand this genre of mourning as more "real" than any feeling of mourning that isn't put together just so, with just-so puttingtogethers of time and its opposite. Does one rebel? Does one criticize? Is it even in the picture? And for Sophocles' Electra, who has a freedom from time that we don't have, though we know (always knowing that we are free to see our knowledge ironically) that it's a falsehood? "Refusal and control of time, such appears to be the preferred linguistic formula to assert the oblivionless existence of Electra" (p. 105). An existence without oblivion? Omnipotence? Isn't this all the same story, the same myth, even myth itself and by extension conceptual thinking? Or is it just the concepts we've elected to deal with that constrain us? Well, in any case I'll give Loraux the final word:
And the negative formulation becomes a claim for omnipotence and a plan for eternity. Nothing of that recourse to litotes we sometimes think is detectable in the utterance of nonoblivion. Just the opposite, the reduplication that reinforces the negation, as in oú pote amnasteȋ 'No, he does not forget,' or the eternity of a future perfect (táde áluta keklḗstai 'Forever it will be called indissoluble'). It is up to us, listening to Freud, to understand in all these utterances the same denial, and the confession, made without the speaker's knowledge, that in fact one shall renounce and disown the wrath to which the future gave assurances of an unlimited becoming; it is up to us especially to understand the confession that the excessive negation will nevertheless be fought–vanquished, or at least silenced, and already forgotten–by another negation, for renunciation also expresses itself with a great many verbs meaning "to deny": apeȋpon in the case of Achilles, and apennépō in the case of the Erinyes, compelled to revoke the prohibitions they had uttered against Athens.
(p. 106)
Labels: Greece, Loraux, mourning, myth, repetition
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
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.
Labels: Casey, imagination, myth, possibility, wandering