Delayed gratification
Yes, I know: it’s un-American. But I can’t help it; I’m busy(!). Expect a new post (one of my longish ones) by the end of the day.
In the meantime, if you need more instant gratification, go here. “Eyesore of the Month” joins Spin of the Day, the Memory Hole, Unknown News and the other sites listed in the “Rants and Dispatches” portion of the sidebar. Enjoy.
UPDATE: Yes, we have no bananas today. Come back tomorrow.
Words on the street
More light! More darkness!
Sometimes clarity can be more confusing than partial obscurity. I found the following quote for the epigrammatic portion of my flawed, book-length poem Cibola:
Who of the desert has not spent his day riding at a mountain and never even reaching its base? This is a land of illusions and thin air. The vision is so cleared at times that the truth itself is deceptive.
John Van Dyke, The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances
A-hunting I shall go for more such quotes. The latest poem at Awake at Dawn contains this reminder:
. . . the word
that means exactly the thing is a waste of memory.
Wonderful!
An older post in evidentiary: alchemy links to an article in the Smithsonian’s website, “Decoding the Past: The Work of Archaeologists”:
To an archaeologist, the soil resembles a historical document; the researcher must decipher, translate, and interpret the soil before it can help him or her understand the human past. But unlike a document, the soil of an archaeological site can be interpreted only once in the state in which it is found. The very process of excavation destroys a site forever, making such an investigation a costly experiment that cannot be repeated.
So with this kind of investigation, there is no simple opposition of clarity and obscurity, but a range of options involving trade-offs between a focus on being and a focus on becoming, the illusory static moment and the equally illusory flow:
As an excavation progresses, it uncovers the past in both horizontal and vertical dimensions. The horizontal dimension reveals a site as it was at a fixed point in time. The vertical dimension shows the sequence of changes within a site over time. Excavation methods vary according to which dimension of the past an archaeologist chooses to study. . . .
Researchers gather two very different sets of information during the course of any excavation. They can examine tangible findings, such as artifacts and the remains of plants, animals, and humans, well after an excavation has ended. However, excavation destroys contextual features, such as building remains, as they are uncovered. To preserve vital information about these remains, archaeologists painstakingly catalog every nuance of a site through volumes of photographs and drawings.
Martin Heidegger may have had something like this in mind when he said that “To clarify means to offend.” But consider the source: I gather from the English translations of his works that the man was constitutionally incapable of writing a clear sentence!
So much of semantic clarity is really just a stylistic affectation, a preference in modern English prose for straight, clear lines. For George Orwell, in his great essay “Politics and the English Language,” such straight lines are essential to warding off the demons of obscurantism allied with political repression. The language of power is quite often filled with intentional obscurities designed to exclude the unknowledgeable and unworthy; many of its words and phrases are so much dross, matrix to be removed only by the trained archaeological worker with the proper tools and a light touch. This is as true of modern bureaucratic jargon as it is of the cryptic utterances of sorcerer-chiefs on the light-drenched verge of the Sahara.
But among many practitioners of modern science and poetry, clarity is extolled as the highest value of communication. What then if the objective truth turns out to be mind-bogglingly complex? Can’t we also learn from language that allows our minds to boggle, to dwell in happy confusion for a while?
And if we say that communication is the sole, or major, purpose of art and language, that completely ignores the affective dimension. A good poem, novel, symphony, etc. doesn’t so much communicate emotion as it reproduces it afresh in the listeners’ hearts. This is kind of like archaeology in reverse: accumulation seems a better metaphor here than excavation, but the trade-off appears quite similar. If I watch/listen analytically, I deprive myself of the joys of full immersion in the creative flow, and vice versa.
With performances in a communal setting, mutual emotional reinforcement among audience members and between performers and audience (who often become indistiguishable) can create an additional, often quite powerful dimension that transcends mere appreciation. The right stimulus at the right moment can produce ecstasy, entheogenesis. We are beside ourselves. The gods descend. Where is your precious Cartesian clarity now?
I’ll give the final word (from the same online source as the Heidegger quote) to Robert Frost: “There is nothing as mysterious as something clearly seen.”
Words on the street
Fictions, useful and otherwise
1. Disclosure
I grew my hair long so I’d have a place to hide. But soon everyone knew me by it: That Guy with the Hair.
I took up smoking to disguise my nervousness around strangers, or in a new place. But then smoking stopped being cool, and the longer I smoked, the more nervous I got. And after I stopped smoking I found it so much easier to sit still. Only my head still pivots left and right to avoid unnecessary eye contact.
These days I wear my hair short, my shoes and glasses are rarely in fashion and if I have an option, I go for unmarked t-shirts. Wearing a message simply seems too stressful. I feel as if I have to live up to whatever image it projects. And shorn of individuating details, isn’t it easiest to see who we really are?
When I stopped trying to hide, I found I could almost disappear. All I have to do is don a different hat and I’m somebody else. It’s great.
I admit, I do still keep a bit of a beard. Disclosure has its limits.
2. Enclosure
I guess it scares some people to think that personality could be so fluid, so arbitrary: nothing more or less than a collection of traits and powers in a role-playing game. They get defensive: “That’s just the way I am!” No, it isn’t.
But if we aren’t who we think we are, then what might we be? And what about the danger of total conformity, the boundaries of the self dissolving?
Perhaps the best way to talk about this is to say that what makes each of us attractive is our originality, not our novelty. Our lives are not novels with clearly defined trajectories plotted in advance, much less compositions intoned by a chorus of Fates or angels. But neither are they random – that’s the hard part to grasp. Matter is inherently self-organizing. So is mind. Sometimes, these patterns appear to converge and strange things happen.
Our selfhood isn’t something opaque and closed off; walls are there merely to define a space. Like a garden or a temple animated with lights and spirits, odors and possibilities, music from many throats. We are unique precisely in the way that every position is unique and each occasion is irreproducible. An openness to the world – which is meaningless unless the option of withdrawal exists – entails a sort of gardener’s familiarity with, and fondness for, the details of the unique positions and occasions of which we are composed. Our integrity as individuals stems directly from this sense of tenancy, of stewardship. How could it be otherwise?
3. Closure
Ah, for a sense of completeness! But whence the current passion for the word closure? It reminds me more than a little of the obsessive focus on orgasms found in most pop-culture talk about sex. The underlying message is the same: At some point in the future, we will achieve satisfaction by living in the present. And in the meantime, our sentences will become, like, more and more indecisive? Definitive pronouncements about much of anything will come to seem more and more, you know, whatever. Though I guess an increased emphasis on seeking agreement isn’t such a bad trend – knome sayin’?
The game this time, I think, is the one with three walnut shells and a little dried-up pea. Save your money.
We may be fat, arrogant assholes, but at least we all smell nice
*
With a title like that, who really needs to write the rest of the essay?
Ann Coulter once memorably opined that “Liberals don’t care about the environment. The core of environmentalism is a hatred for mankind. They want mass infanticide, zero population growth, reduced standards of living and vegetarianism. Most crucially, they want Americans to stop with their infernal deodorant use.”
You see? Nasty liberals smell funny. Just like those peace-mongering, dissolute French. It all fits.
Words on the street
Night
Dibujo uno
de Claudia Torres (Mariposa Amarilla / Yellow Butterfly, Ediciones Navegante, Austin, TX, 1996)
La tarde teje su silencio
en los pequeños bordes de las casas.
Esconde aristas abruptas
al son de la noche espesa.
Las vigas abrazan las soleras y sus tejas.
El amarillo de los rayos se encoge
hasta volverlas nada.
El ovillo azul intenso
se convierte en zumbido titilante,
suspira la luz de la mañana.
El ojo anhela;
apenas un reflejo en la profundidad interna
que batalla los sentidos.
El miedo salta victorioso.
Hace suyo el momento.
Tiembla, treme, tiembla.
El susurro es un largo grito sin ruido.
__________
Sketch #1
Evening weaves its silence
along the narrow borders of the houses.
It conceals sharp edges
with the advancing sound of dense night.
The rafters tighten their grip
on crossbeams, roof tiles.
The last yellow rays dwindle,
return to nothing.
Skein of vivid blue becomes
an arousing hum, the light
of morning on its breath.
The eye hungers:
scarcely a single glimmer
in the deep core
at war with the senses.
Fear leaps up,
overwhelms the moment.
Trembling, quaking, trembling.
A whisper is a long scream without a sound.
__________
Claudia Torres is a linguist and a native of Tegicigalpa, Honduras, born in 1951. In the above poem, I like the images of weaving, and the way its synaesthesia evokes a confusion of emotions perhaps best understood by someone who grew up under a dictatorship, where a midnight knock might mean two, almost opposite things.
Another poem by Torres, “Caballero de Noche / Gentleman of the Night,” includes the following explanatory note: “Gentleman of the Night and Love for a Day are the literal translations of flowers that are common in the author’s native country of Honduras.” This time I’ll put my translation first.
__________
Gentleman of the Night
Shy caresses
all over my skin,
scent of cinnamon,
of guava.
In my tangled hair
there dreams
the dry stroke
of a tender hand.
Gentleman of the night,
love for a day,
lemon tree in blossom,
unpollinated orchid.
You went away,
and it was killing me.
__________
Caballero de Noche
Sobre de la piel
caricias hurañas,
olor de canela,
guayaba.
En el pelo
enredado sueño
el sonido seco
de una mano tierna.
Caballero de noche,
amor de un día,
limonero abierto,
orquídea fallida.
Te fuiste,
y yo me moría.
Words on the street
