Thursday, 7 September 2017

...of Love

the day (or night)

is green
she plays upon a blue guitar

she does not play things as they are
hearing in the air messages un
emitted unadmitted mean

inventing your desire with La belle si tu voulais (bis)
Nous dormirions ensemble o-la (bis)

and answering it unspoken with

No vale la pena el llanto or l’amor è un
atalena or love is just a four-letter word and
more: love is a bore, a soap op
era a telephone that doesn’t ring

in many languages from Lucan to Lacan
she fills the air as well with
syntagmatic silence - from Phaedrus to Freud
Homer to Husserl and Locke to the Li Ki
effortlessly displacing notions with a diachronic chord.

[Thru, Brooke-Rose, C.]

...of a narrator

The axis of desire uniting them authorises a semidyliic interpretation of the two actants as a virtuoso performer subject and an object instituted by itself as valuelessness of the subject performer. Thus the narrative utterance:

NU = F : transfer (E -> o -> R)

The transfer can then be interpreted at the same time as a privation or as a distinction (depending on the level) or as an attribution or as a conjunction (depending on the level) thus representing the circulation of value-objects topologically as an identification of the deictic transfers with the terms of a taxinomic model, each isotopic place (where the performances occur) consisting of two deixes that are conjunctive but equivalent, at the fundamental level, to the contradictory terms out of Oriental and Celtic mists that nobody utters these days, or, if somebody does, can only be met by syntagmatic silence although words are urgently demanded and the demand can only degenerate into useless chatter. She who explains herself is lost.

[Thru, Brooke-Rose, C.]

...of the absent author

There has occurred however the telescoping of the flute-player into a stereotyped foreshortened faun piping right to left on the rectangle of days with weeks and even years in an implicit depth, days that do not see themselves or the four lies reflected in the retrovisor, looking at nothing on or in the brow that Scheherezade thinks too low beneath the mat  of khaki crinkly hair perhaps Etruscan or hiding behind a discourse from which the subjects vanish piecemeal, the one giving no references and other too many thus having a mouth removed and other organs when all that is signifiable in her is struck with latency as soon as raised to the function of signifier which initiates this raising by its original disappearance, the show within the show.
For the idyll reopens out into the other idyll of Armel who is not like that at all and Veronica true icon iconoclasted before the introduction of the pistol, raising antinomies by reaction that overtakes the subjective idea, rendering it objective, here on the ocean edge, and irresistible, Aphrodite emerging from memory and beckoning, naked, sprayed with flowery foam.
For you are not qualcosa as narrated by either yourself or some other who talks like a book and wants to be read like an algebraic grammar of narrative, the punishment in final position never falling on the euphoric term, only on the dyseptic, the moving finger piercing through the the pregnant plenitude from idyll to castratrophy thus bringing about the end of discourse. Nor have you acted out the dialogue spun by the silent narrator who is yourself perhaps making yourself articulate and wise, quick on the uptake gentle cruelonlytobekind with brief mean brushstrokes for objectivity and her semelic wild moon detached and gazing at the earth, tide-driven and helpless so that you can save her and if that is what you want that is how it will be for you always get your way in the end by transforming the passive silence of undecidability into the undecidable. Whoever invented it is the absent narrator or you in love with the unrelaible narrator who is in love with the implied author who is in love with himself and therefore absent in the nature of things through doors opening on doors, mirrors on mirrors in an eternal game of vinciperdi with the presence and absence of signifiers that characterises the practice of language. A head in a pool on a platter in a textured cloth, the head detached to re-present the word, a disembodied voice.

[Thru, Brooke-Rose, C.]

...of that underneath

On hot July days, the wall opposite cast a brilliant, harsh light into the damp little courtyard.
Underneath this heat there was a great void, silence, everything seemed in suspense: the only thing to be heard, aggressive, strident, was the creaking of a chair being dragged across the tiles, the slamming of a door. In this heat, in this silence, it was a sudden coldness, a rending.
And she remained motionless on the edge of her bed, occupying the least possible space, tense, as though waiting for something to burst, to crash down upon her in the threatening silence.
At times the shrill notes of locusts in a meadow petrified by the sun and as though dead, induce this sensation of cold, of solitude, of abandonment in a hostile universe in which something anguishing is impending.
In the silence, penetrating the length of the old blue-striped wallpaper in the hall, the length of the dingy paint, she heard the little click of the key in the front door. She heard the study door close.
She remained there hunched up, waiting, doing nothing.
The slightest act, such as going to the bathroom to wash her hands, letting the water run from the tap, seemed like a provocation, a sudden leap into the void, an extremely daring action. In the suspended silence, the sudden sound of water would be like a signal, like an appeal directed towards them; it would be like some horrible contact, like touching a jellyfish with the end of a stick and then waiting with loathing for it suddenly to shudder, rise up and fall back down again.

[Tropisms, Sarraute, N.]

...of latent rage

In the morning she leapt from her bed early, dashed about the apartment, tart, tense, bursting with shouts and gestures, with gasps of anger, with “scenes.” She went from room to room, nosed about in the kitchen, banged furiously on the door of the bathroom which someone was occupying, and she wanted to break in, to manage, to give them a shaking, to ask them if they were going to stay in there for an hour, or remind them that it was late, that they were going to miss the car or the train, it was too late, that they had already missed something because of their carelessness, their negligence, or that they their breakfast was ready, that it was cold, that it had been waiting for two hours, that it was stone-cold… And it seemed that from her viewpoint there was nothing uglier, more contemptible, more stupid, more hateful, that there was no more obvious sign of inferiority, of weakness, than to let one’s breakfast grow cold, than to come late for breakfast.
Those who were in the secret, the children, came running. The others, who were careless and negligent towards things, being unaware of their power in this house, answered politely in a perfectly natural, gentle manner: “Thank you very much, don’t bother, I rather like coffee that’s a little cold.” To these persons, these outsiders, she did not dare say anything, and because of this one statement, because of this little polite sentence with which they rebuffed her gently, negligently, with a flick of the hand, without even taking her into consideration, without pausing to give her a moment’s thought, for this alone she began to hate them.

[Tropisms, Sarraute, N.]

...of planets

‘Come with me, let’s go have a look at the Southern Cross,’ he says.
He walks out in front of us all the way to the end of the alley, over by the chalta tree. In order to be able to see the Southern Cross you need to be far from the lights of the house. We look up at the sky, almost without breathing. I immediately pinpoint ‘The Followers’ high up in the sky at the tail end of Centaurus. To the right, the Cross hovers palely, slightly tilted, like the sail of a pirogue. Laure and I spot it at the same time, but we don’t need to say anything. We gaze up at the Cross without speaking. Mam comes out to join us and she doesn’t say a word to our father. We just stand there and it seems as if we’re listening to the sound of the planets in the night. It’s so beautiful, there’s no need to say anything. But I can feel that pain in my chest and throat growing tighter, because something has changed on this night, something says that it must all come to an end. Maybe it’s written in the stars - that’s what I think - maybe what needs to be done to keep things from changing and save us is also written in the stars.

[The Prospector, Le Clézio, J. M. G.]

...of friendship

It’s a dizziness that stems from the sea, like a kind of spell cast by the sun and the reflections that is befuddling me and draining my energy. In spite of the torrid heat I feel cold. Denis’s sister and her fiancé help me stretch out in the bottom of the pirogue, in the shade of the sail that is flapping in the breeze. Denis cups seawater in his hands and wets my face and body. Then, punting with his pole, he steers the pirogue over to the shore. A little later we run up on the white beach, near the point of the Morne. There, a few small trees grow - velvet leaf soldierbushes. With Denis’s aid I walk to the shade of one of them. Denis’s sister encourages me to drink a sour substance from a gourd; it burns my tongue and throat and wakes me up. I already want to stand, walk back to the pirogue, but Denis’s sister tells me I must stay in the shade util the sun has begun to go down towards the horizon. The old man has remained in the pirogue, leaning on the pole. Now they’re moving away on the shimmering water to fish some more.
Denis has remained sitting next to me. He doesn’t say anything. He’s just here with me in the shade of the small tree, legs covered with patches of white sand. He’s not like those other children who live in grand estates. He doesn’t need to talk. He’s my friend and his silence here beside me is a way of saying so.
