tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83305739925302218192024-03-13T02:55:17.326-04:00wrætlic: the notebooks of egil on the trammes of tresounone grad student of many who are thinking about old and middle french and english, looking as if at a ruin <i> Wyth al þe wonder of þe worlde what he worch shulde </i>dan remeinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.comBlogger46125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330573992530221819.post-52585316740704282232009-09-25T10:15:00.002-04:002009-09-25T10:31:23.329-04:00small poem/radiant medieval--abstract for post-abysmal panel kalamazoo 2010<span style="font-style: italic;font-family:arial;" ><br />I reject the idea of growth when it is not a growth of pleasure</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>(Anna Klosowska)<br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-style: italic;">A god can do it. But will you tell me how<br />a man can enter through the lyre's strings?<br />...<br />Song, as you have taught it, is not desire,<br />not wooing any grace that can be achieved;<br />song is Dasein </span></span>(Rilke, Sonnet III, altered Mitchell trans.)<span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span><br /></span><br /><br />In complicity with Samuel Beckett’s poem “Alba” and Dante’s Purgatorio, these remarks will explore the possibility of a poetics of vertiginously small places, whose radiant unreadability (re)produces a literary modernism with a medieval heart capable of flouting the lack which would prevent a certain queer mixing of persons, things, pasts, presents, literary spaces and ‘real’ places. Small, because of the formal elements of the poem; vertiginous and indeed optimistically radiant in the ensuing density and unreadability of its complicity with medieval material—what might have been appropriated as modernist purgatorial, paradisiacal, or alchemical (transformational) lack appears instead as the ease of giving-in to the allure of such a densely radiant place. In the place called to appearance by the poem, the reader is invited to plunge into a radiant black-hole where distinctions between medieval, modern, persons, things, language (and the lack supposedly governing them) are all replaced by the production of a small place.<br /><br /><br />and, for your reading pleasure, the <span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Beckett poem in question:<br /><br /></span></span></span><span style="font-style: italic;">before morning you shall be here</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">and Dante and the Logos and all strata and mysteries</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">and the branded moon</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">beyond the white plane of music</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">that you shall establish here before morning</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">grave suave singing silk</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">stoop to the black firmament of areca</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">rain on the bamboos flowers of smoke alley of willows</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">who though you stoop with fingers of compassion</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">to endorse the dust</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">shall not add to your bounty</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">whose beauty shall be a sheet before me</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">a statement of itself drawn across the tempest of emblems</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">so that there is no sun and no unveiling</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">and no host</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">only I and then the sheet</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">and bulk dead</span>dan remeinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330573992530221819.post-12191562163789119782009-07-18T10:43:00.006-04:002009-07-18T10:55:03.182-04:00puffins and computers and digital anglo-saxon<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPE9LqogoFRShu5HKtLk2dxK4dPTx59ZpJHgSJT8eMdbq7caQ54l4MIlA3HgmTZFwc1uHhSKC_d5p9AQs2JQ32CKmY0fJ6J9o6xp2xkQqOf_2uSGUX2NZT1qjxnCUccN0xEAd22DlHYwjx/s1600-h/St+John%27s+Newfoundland.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPE9LqogoFRShu5HKtLk2dxK4dPTx59ZpJHgSJT8eMdbq7caQ54l4MIlA3HgmTZFwc1uHhSKC_d5p9AQs2JQ32CKmY0fJ6J9o6xp2xkQqOf_2uSGUX2NZT1qjxnCUccN0xEAd22DlHYwjx/s200/St+John%27s+Newfoundland.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5359812453103589858" border="0" /></a><br /><div class="Section1"> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>I am about to head off to St. John’s Newfoundland, a little ahead of schedule (so as to better take in Newfoundland) for the ISAS (International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, for you non-medievalist readers) New Media and Old English Workshop and then this year’s ISAS conference.<span style=""> </span>I wanted to share here a little of what I am going to try to think about at the workshop, although I am sure that very little of it will explicitly make it into my specific thought and work, because my overarching concerns are much too large to deal with adequately in two days. The workshop should be great.<span style=""> </span>Martin Foys (<i>Virtually Anglo-Saxon</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, UP Florida) is running a theory section, and<span style=""> </span>Daniel O’Donell is running a section on the coding that goes into to making electronic editions etc.—my friends Mo Pareles and Mary Kate Hurlery will also be attending.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">I’ll try to give blog updates during the conference if something strikes me.<span style=""> </span>Of particular interest should be a panel on whales on the last, featuring a paper by Hal Momma.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS7Xf_W-ycbAAHkllEGqwWJnGqTrPq4IOAsQ0JCzDws_Cdp6ICw6MoqMzjnrTV_D7W6A0rLSaFfQat5DlwifkGaiyyNFRmQ847ZoJnM94FTY8Eidwg9aq6Sclc2JQi22-kFnmGaHE2X9ld/s1600-h/whale_tail_lighthouse.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 134px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS7Xf_W-ycbAAHkllEGqwWJnGqTrPq4IOAsQ0JCzDws_Cdp6ICw6MoqMzjnrTV_D7W6A0rLSaFfQat5DlwifkGaiyyNFRmQ847ZoJnM94FTY8Eidwg9aq6Sclc2JQi22-kFnmGaHE2X9ld/s200/whale_tail_lighthouse.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5359812857816324178" border="0" /></a><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">Because I know this is going to get away from me—I will have tried to condense and re-write several times by the time I post I am sure—I will say first that hope to work with Exeter Riddle 67 (ASPR numbers), which is very badly damaged, to try to experiment with producing a platform on which editions of OE verse can be collaboratively produced, wherein editing, commentary (philological and otherwise), and translation could occur in more radical and opposition forms of contemporary scholarship and verse than what is generally seen.<span style=""> </span>What is possible here practically is something I don’t know much about (and thus hope to learn here...), so I will focus now on the theoretical side.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYZv_y-UqBS_Vxw2YXGdA0oFxjTqqlIyHoJtuYiL1JlOZ0i0JadGl9jC1oEgmvsmCH1Ks4pdUfhHUKecs9Pq0Rr-sR26x-b6YX8IavWXAgMF6CeaGHYMxz7lnaG4DK1DlJnafOzJx9Pzp6/s1600-h/atlantic_puffins_sc78.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 134px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYZv_y-UqBS_Vxw2YXGdA0oFxjTqqlIyHoJtuYiL1JlOZ0i0JadGl9jC1oEgmvsmCH1Ks4pdUfhHUKecs9Pq0Rr-sR26x-b6YX8IavWXAgMF6CeaGHYMxz7lnaG4DK1DlJnafOzJx9Pzp6/s200/atlantic_puffins_sc78.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5359812579114349410" border="0" /></a></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span>My theoretical impulses arise out of rethinking media studies as it relates to poetry through the poetics of the 20<sup>th</sup> century Black Mountain School poetics. I want to attempt this, not our of arbitrary experimentation, but as a strategic move designed to disrupt and provoke a re-thinking of, at once, what might seem unrelated phenomenon associated with Old English verse.<span style=""> </span>So my impulse ultimately arises from my dissatisfaction with how OE poetry appears in and is allowed to effect (both in terms simply of what is done, and in terms of how our discipline is policed for ‘acceptable’ work) a) contemporary scholarship b) contemporary poetics as a result (I’d propose) of its mediation in modern English by contemporary poets who perpetuate the poetics of expression of deep image and do not seek to disrupt or destroy the status-quo of possible imaginings of human language and in turn the capacities of the human imagination; and also what appears to remain the most widely accepted model of producing editions and working on manuscripts and their mediation—that is, The work of the individual (as if <i>still</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> the myth of the </span><i>individual</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> genius </span><i>auctor</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> covertly survives for Editors of medieval texts who make “final decisions” and find “final solutions” to cruxes in what thus amounts to this authoritarian and totalitarian poetics of edition—or policing the borders of the actual exchange of modern writing, be it scholarly or ‘creative’ with the past).</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span>That OE verse is mediated in contemporary poetry should perhaps be rationale enough to consider how a particular theory of poetics would effect our theories of the mediation of OE verse; yet, additionally, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan lead me to re-think media not so much as ‘containers’ which deliver what they mediate and thus can be governed but as sites which arise out of and produce transfers of energy with the past, which, being open sites, produce and are produced by, collaborative efforts.<span style=""> </span>Thus, with a black box around the theory for the sake of this synopsis, thinking mediation of Old English verse through the ‘Projective Verse’ poetics of the above poets becomes a way to think an alternative to two conservative practices of our discipline which emerge as linked in the end at least by what undoes them, if not by their shared relationship to a poetics of mediation in which media is a closed container that can and should be sealed by a single authoritative mind (be it by expertise or poetic transcendence, it does not matter).<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>Why these poetics?<span style=""> </span>Already, in the 1940’s through the 60’s, despite what Charles’ Altieri called, in his early literary history “From Symbolist Thought to Immanence: The Ground of Postmodern American Poetics,” their “contemporary distrust of mediation,” a certain model of the poem proper to the so-called Black Mountain School abounded which offers an alterative way to think about the <i>sites </i><span style="font-style: normal;">of mediation not as containers of information but as the locale of an exchange of human energies.<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/shorter%20project%20description.htm#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[i]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span>Some basic adding up of important dictums of the literary movement makes this clear.<span style=""> </span>Over thirty years prior to Carolyn Dinshaw’s call for “getting medieval on—or with—your very breath,” a relation to the past in which “using ideas of the past, creating relations with the past, touching in this way the past in our efforts to build selves and communities now and into the future”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/shorter%20project%20description.htm#_edn2" name="_ednref2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[ii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a>—before this Olson called for </span><i>poetry</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> in which “History measures the intensity of the past by letting us see how past actions create energy for use by the presen`t”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/shorter%20project%20description.htm#_edn3" name="_ednref3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[iii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a>—in the sense of </span><i>measuring</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is deeply connected to Olson’s own queer medium, the event of a breath which can hold in its measure of the poetic line the syllable, where the syllable is the queerly incestuous offspring of the brother-sister mind and ear,<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/shorter%20project%20description.htm#_edn4" name="_ednref4" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[iv]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> and the poem, rather than a medium containing a content, is a force of which we can only speak of<span style=""> </span>“the </span><i>kinetics</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of the thing.<span style=""> </span>A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations).” That is, for Olson, the breathed line of a poem was to mediate the past in its meters not so much by containing and bounding off a bit of the past ‘contained’ in the medium, as pigment is contained in a painting medium such as oil or egg tempera bases, but as an event of mediation.<span style=""> </span>As regards material, and especially </span><i>literary</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> material of the past, Olson’s line would change the terms of how a </span><i>medium </i><span style="font-style: normal;">could be conceived by expanding its possibilities to include a specific locale and event (the utterance of a line of poetry and its effects) and what exactly out thinking of mediation is supposed to conceptualize.<span style=""> </span>Such a medium is not vehicle or container but a wholly new thing, a site of exchange of (affective) energy—a site, a locale.<span style=""> </span>Thus Olson’s poetics are of what he called “COMPOSITION BY FIELD” in which objects “are made to </span><i>hold</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, and to hold exactly inside the content and the context of the poem which has forced itself, through the poet and them, into being.”<span style=""> </span>Thus a poem as mediation of the past, if we still insist on poetry as a </span><i>medium</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, </span><i>occurs as a site of a transfer of affective energies with the past</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, just as Olson is willing to versify the emphatic fragment “to build out of sound the wall/ of a city” and be happy to “use that word [history] to stand for city.<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/shorter%20project%20description.htm#_edn5" name="_ednref5" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[v]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Robert Creeley writes, thinking of Robert Duncan’s </span><i>The Opening of the Field</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, “The sense of that poem—that </span><i>place</i><span style="font-style: normal;">” as a place [quoting H.D.] “I go where I love and am loved”, as ‘a very distinct and definite </span><i>place</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, that poetry not only creates but itself issues from.”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/shorter%20project%20description.htm#_edn6" name="_ednref6" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[vi]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span>All of this is thus to bolster a much more succinct but expansive question governing my project: </span><i>what is a possible poetics of Old English poetry in new media?</i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style=""> </span>How would </span><i>poetics</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> as the transfer of energy with the past issuing form and producing </span><i>places </i><span style="font-style: normal;">productively displace our thought about the </span><i>mediation</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of Old English in translations and digital editions? <span style=""> </span>The<span style=""> </span></span><i>poetics </i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style=""> </span>of mediation by Media Edition of Old English Verse and the translation of OE verse (which should probably be joined) who demand that the edition is not a sealed container to bring the past to you, but a site </span><i>arising from and producing a transfer of affective energy with the past</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> and thus must be A) a collaboratively produced site and a site producing collaboration so as to keep the transfers of energy going, the city built for and by the kinetic forces of collaboratively (not authorative-tarianly) reading, editing, and translating OE verse; and B) poetic, and radically so, which is to say, however much it risks verging on the impractical, not descriptive—as the descriptive too easily lends itself to the conceptualizing of the media as an accurate sealed container in the correspondence theory of truth.<span style=""> </span>Kinetic force and not containment: “One breaks the line of aesthetics, or that outcrop of a general division of knowledge.<span style=""> </span>A sense of the KINETIC impels recognition of force,” thus “A poetry denies its end in any </span><i>descriptive</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> act...</span><i>Description</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> does nothing, it includes the object—it neither hates nor loves.”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/shorter%20project%20description.htm#_edn7" name="_ednref7" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[vii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>I have chosen a riddle with such MS damage because I hope it will leave a good deal of room for radical thought to go one in and around it, with its inherent potential to provoke speculative thought and demand incomplete and fragmentary editing and translating practices, alongside some work of speculation. This poem facilitates easily a first attempt of an edition desiring specifically to <i>not</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> be authoritative and ‘final’ in its solutions.<span style=""> </span>How can a site of transfers of energy with the past arise as a digital/new media edition of Exeter Book Riddle 67 (ASPR numbering), which contains massive MS damage, making the process of editing difficult, much less the question of how to approach a translation?<span style=""> </span>The apparatus must be set up so that it cannot be contained, nor its borders fuller policed, lacking an authoritarian structure—a </span><i>gemot</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> or a </span><i>symbel</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> and not a modern/capitalistic state—so there can be </span><i>no final edition and thus no ‘final solutions</i><span style="font-style: normal;">’: a sort of multiplicity of scores for singing into place a heterotopia of scholarship under the guise of an edition of an OE poem.<span style=""> </span>This would be one way, I hope, to facilitate an end both to the authoritarian model of editing, and to promote the mediation of OE verse in Radical Modern English poetry.</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgs7bjKC0lcXlq2mjf-n9xzZqvF9IhR1i41mqaiZ3Cs80k2rcJJZi5LjlD63zjMhrCKaVFRTGEvL8ggAlvYghLf0ohUnIqNntNX52qjAHikLtmDk9qKKZHRWv2tTVN27KxrVvMso-efIvc5/s1600-h/quidi-vidi_793.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 133px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgs7bjKC0lcXlq2mjf-n9xzZqvF9IhR1i41mqaiZ3Cs80k2rcJJZi5LjlD63zjMhrCKaVFRTGEvL8ggAlvYghLf0ohUnIqNntNX52qjAHikLtmDk9qKKZHRWv2tTVN27KxrVvMso-efIvc5/s200/quidi-vidi_793.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5359813133280188322" border="0" /></a></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">and, ps, I'll try to post some photo's of my own throughout and after the conference. I wanted to go to Newfoundland since I discovered it was a place while examining a globe in my third-grade classroom (that of Mrs. Loksa, Westerly School). So, dear north, don't let me down.<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> </div> <div style=""><!--[if !supportEndnotes]--> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%"> <!--[endif]--> <div style="" id="edn1"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/shorter%20project%20description.htm#_ednref1" name="_edn1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[i]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> The Black Mountain poets has an interesting attitude toward the <i>page</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> which shares a certain nearness with medieval reading styles, that is to conceive of the page a sort of musical score rather than the poem itself, and thus not truly a mediation of the poem, but a tool which allowed the poem to be performed, thus “One wants to write the poem, put it, as ultimately one would say it; the page is his means, </span><i>not </i><span style="font-style: normal;">his end.<span style=""> </span>If we grant that poetry must be relegated, finally, to what the eye can read, then we have no poetry” (Creeley, “A Note On Poetry,” </span><i>Quick Graph, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">27).<span style=""> </span>Much as OE verse which, because of its shape on the page without punctuation or spacing, much be sounded out to be read, the Black Mountain Poets’ work must be sounded out on account of its spacing on the page as a score—another problem media theory cannot fully account for despite its sophistication re: digital media: “It is the advantage of the typewriter [and how much more the laptop and web browser!] that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends.<span style=""> </span>For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had...[so that]<span style=""> </span>any reader, silently or otherwise, [is able] to voice his work,” “If a contemporary poet leaves a space as long as the phrase before it, he means that space to be held, by the breath, and equal length of time...” (Charles Olson “Projective Verse” (see below) 618).<o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn2"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/shorter%20project%20description.htm#_ednref2" name="_edn2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[ii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Carolyn Dinshaw, <i>Getting Medieval</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (Durham: Duke UP, 1999), 206.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn3"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/shorter%20project%20description.htm#_ednref3" name="_edn3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[iii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Charles Altieri, 130.</p> </div> <div style="" id="edn4"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/shorter%20project%20description.htm#_ednref4" name="_edn4" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[iv]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Charles Olson, “Projective Verse,” in <i>Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, Ed. Paul Hoover (New York: Norton, 1994): “I say the syllable, king, and that it is spontaneous, this way: the ear, the ear which has collected, which has listened, the eat, which is so close to the mind that it is the mind’s that it has the mind’s speed...¶ it is close, another way: the mind is brother to the sister and is, because it is so close, is the drying force, the incest, the sharpening...¶ it is from the union of the mind and ear that the syllable is born.<span style=""> </span>¶<span style=""> </span>But the syllable is only the first child of the incest of verse...The other child is the LINE.<span style=""> </span>And together, these twos, the syllable </span><i>and</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> the line, they make a poem.” <o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn5"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/shorter%20project%20description.htm#_ednref5" name="_edn5" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[v]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Charles Olson, <i>Causal Mythology</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (San Francisco: Four Seasons, 1969), 19.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn6"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/shorter%20project%20description.htm#_ednref6" name="_edn6" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[vi]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Robert Creeley, “I’m Given to Write Poems,” in <i>A Quick Graph: Collected Notes and essay</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, Ed. Donald Allen (San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1970), 63.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn7"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/shorter%20project%20description.htm#_ednref7" name="_edn7" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[vii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Creeley, “To Define” in <i>A Quick Graph</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, 23.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> </div>dan remeinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330573992530221819.post-67582795065055650252009-06-18T00:34:00.001-04:002009-06-18T00:38:51.419-04:00detectives and secrets<div class="Section1"> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style=""> </span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">I hope, eventually, to avoid entirely the construction of a narrative around, before, or behind my poems.<span style=""> </span>The commentary will grow up, an apparatus around them, well before the poems themselves are written, spreading like a system always equidistant from every point in the writing, but shaped nothing like a sphere or a circle; accompanied by and producing theories connecting writing to everything.Tomorrow I <i>will have written</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> the poem beginning </span><i>a secret most marvelous</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, a riddle.<span style=""> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 2in; line-height: 150%;">a secret most marvelous:</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 2in; line-height: 150%;">candidate reports</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 2in; line-height: 150%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 2in; line-height: 150%;">teeth and claws</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 2in; line-height: 150%;">most humane mode</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 2in; line-height: 150%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 2in; line-height: 150%;">of being drawn towards</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 2in; line-height: 150%;">un-rest.<span style=""> </span>& as for</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 2in; line-height: 150%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 2in; line-height: 150%;">counting the faces</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 2in; line-height: 150%;">of the screened...</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">The poem is in four stanzas, with a good deal of enjambment.<span style=""> </span>There are two sentences, the second of which does not complete its course before an ellipsis.<span style=""> </span>The first sentence is an announcement of a most marvelous secret, and the second consists of a digression.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><b><i>secret</i></b><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>: </b></span>“What is the interpreter to make of secrecy considered as a property of all narrative, provided it is suitably attended to?”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/2nd%20prosimetrum%20for%20wraetlic.htm#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[i]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> What are we to make of secrecy or the secret as something which <i>is</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> not but rather is generated.<span style=""> </span>What indeed if secrecy appears not in narrative, but in a radiance which resists narrativization?<span style=""> </span>Or, rather, is there any hope for such resistance?<span style=""> </span>For, “there has to be trickery.”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/2nd%20prosimetrum%20for%20wraetlic.htm#_edn2" name="_ednref2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[ii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span>Frank Kermode may speak of the “radiant obscurity of narratives”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/2nd%20prosimetrum%20for%20wraetlic.htm#_edn3" name="_ednref3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[iii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a>; but is there not some hope not only in the seeking of the “divined glimmer” that one </span><i>perceives</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> as ‘behind’ the fabric of the text, but rather in the manufacturing of a secret which radiates as it undoes itself as a secret?<span style=""> </span>Then, even if “Hot for secrets, our only conversation may be with guardians who know less and see less than we can, and our sole hope and pleasure is in the perception of a momentary radiance, before the door of disappointment is finally shut on us,” and even if that the momentary radiance is a fiction anyway—none of this threatens the optimism of the riddle.<span style=""> </span></span><b><i>most marvelous:</i></b><span style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;"> the marvelous here radiates as the expenditure of its secret, not as the intentional concealment thereof so as to effect a flight from the world.<span style=""> </span>The marvel of the riddle is to pull one into the text in such way that the text wears a hole in itself and one winds up back in the world </span><i>because</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of following a marvelous radiance. And the marvel? there was nothing there to begin with.<span style=""> </span></span><b><i>teeth and claws/ most humane mode: </i></b><span style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;">perhaps an addendum to Frye’s </span><i>modes </i><span style="font-style: normal;">as an (Aristotelian) category of literature.<span style=""> </span>The teeth and claws of the riddle that bites back, of the claws scuttling at the bottom of silent seas which occasionally beat out a rhythm that churns into a maelstrom without intending any such thing.<span style=""> </span>These are the teeth and claws of the ‘creatures’ of high modernism with a certain “image-breaking enterprise,”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/2nd%20prosimetrum%20for%20wraetlic.htm#_edn4" name="_ednref4" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[iv]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> associated with a lineage of certain of Eliot’s poems, Samuel Beckett, Dostoevsky, Kafka, the late Pound and the late H.D., and even certain of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and others usually seen as so serious and abysmal, as provoking primordial anxieties.<span style=""> </span>But, equally, these teeth and claws are for pleasure and delight. And such a modernism, in tune with the radiant medieval of the poet and theorist Dante whose quotations provide epigraphs for this new work, also, and first, could be re-understood as turning to expose the human to a more intense and radiant pleasure: scratching nether-regions and biting exquisitely—clawing away at the image not just to pull back and expose an abyss, but also to kindle the ruin of the image into a burning radiance. </span><b><i>drawn towards/ un-rest: </i></b><span style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;">“Our time calls for an existence-Art, one which, by refusing to resolve discords into the satisfying concordances of a </span><i>telos</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, constitutes an assault against an </span><i>art-</i><span style="font-style: normal;">ificialized Nature in behalf of the recovery of its primordial terrors.<span style=""> </span>The most immediate task, therefore, in which the contemporary writer must engage himself—it is, to borrow a phrase ungratefully from Yeats, the most difficult task not impossible—is that of undermining the detective-like expectation of the positivistic mind, of unhoming Western man, by evoking rather than purging pity and terror—anxiety...to drive him out of the fictitious well-made world, not to be gathered into the “artifice of eternity,” but to be exposed to the existential real of history, where Nothing is certain.”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/2nd%20prosimetrum%20for%20wraetlic.htm#_edn5" name="_ednref5" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[v]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span>Such is the riddle for which there the only solution is its own burning up.<span style=""> </span>The addition of </span><i>pleasure</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> and radiance to this formulation of William Spanos is perhaps necessary after the years in the interim between when this work appears as beginning as the moment of assessing and praising a disruptive modernism since “The Western structure of consciousness is bent, however inadvertently, on unleashing chaos in the name of the order of a well-made world,”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/2nd%20prosimetrum%20for%20wraetlic.htm#_edn6" name="_ednref6" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[vi]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> suggesting that the cost of a resolving well made anything is simply too high.<span style=""> </span>Because, crudely put, a well-made thing and things done in the name of the well-made, the resolved, the solvable, comfort the western positivistic mind, Spanos calls for the anxiety-evoking.<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/2nd%20prosimetrum%20for%20wraetlic.htm#_edn7" name="_ednref7" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[vii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span>The riddle is, the wonder would be, to take pleasure in and make pleasurable the production and experience of an art that un-homes the human with ease—that infinitely frustrates the detective without losing a certain radiance.<span style=""> </span>The trouble with being entirely ‘post’-abysmal is that the “</span><i>Urgrund</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, the primordial not-at-home” is “where dread, as Kierkegaard and Heidegger and Sartre and Tillich tell us, becomes not just the agency of despair but also and simultaneously of hope, that is, of freedom and infinite possibility.”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/2nd%20prosimetrum%20for%20wraetlic.htm#_edn8" name="_ednref8" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[viii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span>And the problem of being purely negative and abysmal: the pleasure of falling, the ability of some to experience the riddle whose answer is both everything and whose answer does not exist as a radiance all its own.<span style=""> </span></span><b><i>the faces of the screened:</i></b><span style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;"> me, us, you, we, them, she, he, us, you, me, we.<span style=""> </span>Totally unaccountable, various answers to the riddle. Various subjects on which any </span><i>candidate</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> as solution to the riddle</span><i> reports</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> </div> <div style=""><!--[if !supportEndnotes]--><br /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%"> <!--[endif]--> <div style="" id="edn1"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/2nd%20prosimetrum%20for%20wraetlic.htm#_ednref1" name="_edn1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:25"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[i]<!--[endif]--></span></ins></span></span></a><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:25"> Frank Kermode, <i>The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative</i></ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:25"> (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 144.</ins></span><o:p></o:p></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn2"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/2nd%20prosimetrum%20for%20wraetlic.htm#_ednref2" name="_edn2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:27"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[ii]<!--[endif]--></span></ins></span></span></a><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:27"> ibid., 145.</ins></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn3"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/2nd%20prosimetrum%20for%20wraetlic.htm#_ednref3" name="_edn3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:30"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[iii]<!--[endif]--></span></ins></span></span></a><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:30"> ibid., 47.</ins></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn4"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/2nd%20prosimetrum%20for%20wraetlic.htm#_ednref4" name="_edn4" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:20"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[iv]<!--[endif]--></span></ins></span></span></a><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:20"> </ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:21">William V. Spanos, “The Detective and the Boundary,” in <i>Early Postmodernism:Foundational Essays</i></ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:21">, Ed. Paul A. Bové (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995),</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:20">39.</ins></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn5"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/2nd%20prosimetrum%20for%20wraetlic.htm#_ednref5" name="_edn5" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:43"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[v]<!--[endif]--></span></ins></span></span></a><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:43"> </ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:44">ibid.</ins></span><o:p></o:p></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn6"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/2nd%20prosimetrum%20for%20wraetlic.htm#_ednref6" name="_edn6" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:48"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[vi]<!--[endif]--></span></ins></span></span></a><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:48"> ibid.,38.</ins></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn7"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/2nd%20prosimetrum%20for%20wraetlic.htm#_ednref7" name="_edn7" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:51"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[vii]<!--[endif]--></span></ins></span></span></a><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:51"> For Spanos, in the moment of his work on this essay, </ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:52">the modern mind produces certain expectations and “these expectations demand the kind of fiction and drama that achieves its absolute </ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:11">fulfillment</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:52"> in the utterly </ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:53">formularized</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:52"> clockwork </ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:53">certainties</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:52"> of plot in the innumerable det</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:53">ect</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:52">ive drama series</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:53">—<i>Perry Mason, The FBI</i></ins></span><i><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:54">, Hawaii 5-0, Mannix, Mission Impossible, </ins></span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:54">etc.—which use up, or rather, “kill,” prime television time [that these shows are dated at the drafting of this essay is not a problem—the situation has changed little beyond expanding the </ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:55">‘stakes’ and the terms of the detective show from Cold War conflicts to that of ‘global terror’ in shows like </ins></span></span><i><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:55">24,</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:56"> The Fringe,</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:55"> </ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:56">CSI, and </ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:55">The Wire</ins></span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:55">, </ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:56">while perhaps adding a new element of biopolitics in shows where the solution is medical but no less detective-style dectecable in </ins></span></span><i><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:55">Hous</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:57">e </ins></span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:57">or </ins></span></span><i><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T20:57">Bones</ins></span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:06">—the point is that there is a re-surgence of shows where there are resolved detectable answers, rendered unsecret by positivistic science and technology, for the sake of a well-made </ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:07">capitalist</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:06"> state</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:07">]. <span style=""> </span>Ultimately they also demand the kind of social and political organization that finds its fulfillment in the imposed certainties of the well-made world of the </ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:08">totalitarian</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:07"> state, where investigation or inquisition on behalf of the ahievement of a total, that is, preordained or teleologically determined structure</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:08">—</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:07">a </ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:08">“final solution”—is the defining activity.<span style=""> </span>It is therefore no accident that the paradigmatic archetype of the postmodern literary imagination is the anti-detective story...the formal purpose of which is to evoke the impulse to</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:09"> “detect” and/or psychoanalyze in order to violently frustrate it by refusing the solve the cime...I am referring, for example, to works like Kafka</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:10">’s </ins></span></span><i><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:10">The Trial</ins></span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:10">, T.S. Eliot’s </ins></span></span><i><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:10">Sweeney Agonistes</ins></span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:10">...Beckett’s </ins></span></span><i><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:10">Watt </ins></span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:10">and </ins></span></span><i><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:10">Molloy</ins></span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:10">...Robbe-Grillet</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:11">’s </ins></span></span><i><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:11">The Erasers</ins></span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:11">...” (25).</ins></span><o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn8"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/2nd%20prosimetrum%20for%20wraetlic.htm#_ednref8" name="_edn8" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:13"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[viii]<!--[endif]--></span></ins></span></span></a><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-11T21:13"> ibid., 27.</ins></span></p> </div> </div>dan remeinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330573992530221819.post-31488976039973621402009-06-14T19:59:00.003-04:002009-06-18T22:05:27.632-04:00more prosimetrum<div class="Section1"> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">Paths to the radiant abyss: Tomaž Šalamun almost ends one of his poems with the simple line “My hands shine.”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/prosimentrum%203%20for%20wraetlic.htm#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><span class="EndnoteCharacters"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[i]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Another such jewel arises from a poem which, being very brief, is easily quoted in full: “A book of photographs:/ A tale of the perfect lover.// Learn from the eye of others.// God is my reader.”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/prosimentrum%203%20for%20wraetlic.htm#_edn2" name="_ednref2" title=""><span class="EndnoteCharacters"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[ii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Thus the poet makes friends with readers of his poems. I would offer this next poem, beginning <i>but if i offer you</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, a missive, in the spirit of such work which would allow a re-thinking of the ground of connection and time:<span style=""> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2in; line-height: 150%;">but if i offer you </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2in; line-height: 150%;">any</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2in; line-height: 150%;">make for the little seam</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2in; line-height: 150%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2in; line-height: 150%;">& it’s true,</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2in; line-height: 150%;">if only because</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2in; line-height: 150%;">a flag of your blood</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2in; line-height: 150%;">on your palm</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2in; line-height: 150%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2in; line-height: 150%;">says,</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2in; line-height: 150%;">i heed you</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2in; line-height: 150%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2in; line-height: 150%;">famously, beatrice,</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2in; line-height: 150%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2in; line-height: 150%;">with a feather, on</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2in; line-height: 150%;">the hunt.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><b><i>any:</i></b><span style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;"> a queer creature of two-syllables. </span><i>Any</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> used substantively is commensurate with a certain evasion of description proper to the transfer of energy that the missive must entail as well as the particular efficiency of this two-syllable word: bright as a small flag of blood itself and pluridrectional in its potential travel down the lip of the poet. As something </span><i>offerable</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, the energy of two tiny syllables is potentially immense, for “It would do no harm, as an act of correction to both prose and verse as now written, if both rime and mater, and, in the quantity of words, both sense and sound, were less in the forefront of the mind than the syllable, if the syllable, that fine creature, were more allowed to lead the harmony on.<span style=""> </span>With this warning, to those who would try: to step back here to this place of the elements of and minims of language, is to engage speech where it is least careless—and least logical.”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/prosimentrum%203%20for%20wraetlic.htm#_edn3" name="_ednref3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[iii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span>For Charles Olsen, the syllable is the product of the incest of the brother mind and sister ear.<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/prosimentrum%203%20for%20wraetlic.htm#_edn4" name="_ednref4" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[iv]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> </span><i>any<span style=""> </span>any<span style=""> </span>any<span style=""> </span></i><span style="font-style: normal;">brother or sister<span style=""> </span>breath listening </span><i>any</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> as offered the thing itself issues <span style=""> </span>from </span><b><i>the little seam:</i></b><span style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;"> as the very tiniest beginnings of the abyss—the seam or split in the fabric—perhaps here even still stitched together so close, so there it is.<span style=""> </span>The little seam: a little leverage for the horns growing in the breast of the human, ready to take on the cosmos as un-mixing with h/er/is </span><i>proper</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> person, as confined into the correct syntactic slot and the slip where those creatures—yes, even<span style=""> </span>creatures consigned to hell in Dante’s </span><i>Commedia</i><span style="font-style: normal;">—appear and verify the urgency of the missive: “How uncertain when I said unwind the winding, Chiron,/ Cross of Two Orders! Grammarian! from your side the never/ healing!/ Undo the bindings of immutable syntax!// The eyes that are horns of the moon feast on the leaves of trampled sentences.”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/prosimentrum%203%20for%20wraetlic.htm#_edn5" name="_ednref5" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[v]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span></span><b><i>a flag of<span style=""> </span>your blood: </i></b><span style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;">“It’s that when I see you/ I bleed a little,/ into the teacup and into the wren’s nest”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/prosimentrum%203%20for%20wraetlic.htm#_edn6" name="_ednref6" title=""><span class="EndnoteCharacters"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[vi]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a>;<span style=""> </span>this is what you might say when the energy of the syllable bursts up through the tiniest seam, when a tiny bit of a medieval poem bursts into your own present through the cracks in the surface of the syntax.<span style=""> </span>It is thus as this flag blood that famously, Beatrice can speak as her own missive or signal within the poem such that the speaker might heed her famously.<span style=""> </span></span><b><i>Beatrice:</i></b><span style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;"> as for Dante, a warning as if a storm warning flag, poking up through the seam through the centuries.<span style=""> </span>A little flag of a syllable beats out its queer warning.<span style=""> </span>Olson teaches that “I say the syllable, king, and that it is spontaneous, this way: the ear, the ear which has collected, which has listened, the ear, which is so close to the mind that it is the mind’s, that ir has the mind’s speed...¶<span style=""> </span>it is close, another way: the mind is brother to this sister and it, because it is so close, is the drying force, the incest, the sharpener...¶<span style=""> </span>it is from the union of the mind and the ear that the syllable is born.”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/prosimentrum%203%20for%20wraetlic.htm#_edn7" name="_ednref7" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[vii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span>Thus, </span><i>be-a-tri-ce, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">four syllables, compacted by the mind and pushed out from the heart into the breath of the projecting line, at just the right moment, from the past, makes for the queer warning to any Dante of the 21<sup>st</sup> century, flagging down the ear with the single syllable </span><i>blood</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, and then the single syllable </span><i>heed.<span style=""> </span></i><span style="font-style: normal;">The mind, getting medieval, becoming syllabic, hearing its own incest with the past crack the surface of a syntax and allow the </span><i>effects </i><span style="font-style: normal;">of the line to arise, wherein “the descriptive functions generally have to be watched, every second...because of their easiness, and thus their drain on the energy which composition by field allows into the poem. </span><i>Any</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> [and there is that word again] slackness takes off attention, that at crucial thing, from the job in hand, from the </span><i>push</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of the line under hand at the moment.”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/prosimentrum%203%20for%20wraetlic.htm#_edn8" name="_ednref8" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[viii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> </span><b><i>on/ the hunt: </i></b><span style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;">Beatrice, hunting boar, like Bertilak in </span><i>Sir Gawain and the Green Knight</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. Beatrice is unlike Bertilak’s lady, who hunts the knight Gawain.<span style=""> </span>The push of Beatrice’s line should be likened to the energy of Bertilak’s dog’s, pushing up enough air for breath that in her wake (for, consider the syllables at play in such a line as this: “The howndez that it herde hastid thider swythe”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/prosimentrum%203%20for%20wraetlic.htm#_edn9" name="_ednref9" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[ix]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> [the hounds that heard it hurried there forcefully]) that we might—in the space of the commentary on her bright and forceful flag—“much speche” here “expoun/ of druyes greme and grace.”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/prosimentrum%203%20for%20wraetlic.htm#_edn10" name="_ednref10" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[x]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> </div> <div style=""><!--[if !supportEndnotes]--><br /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%"> <!--[endif]--> <div style="" id="edn1"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/prosimentrum%203%20for%20wraetlic.htm#_ednref1" name="_edn1" title=""><span class="EndnoteCharacters"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--></span></span></a></p></div></div><br /><br />[i] Tomaž Šalamun, “a ballad for metka krašovec,” in A Ballad for Metka Krašovec, trans. Michael Biggins (Prague: Twisted Spoon Press, 2001), 65<br /><br />[ii] ibid., 66.<br /><br />[iii] Charles Olson, “Projective Verse,” in Postmodern American Poetry: a Norton Anthology, Ed. Paul Hoover (New York: Norton, 1994, 615.<br /><br />[iv] ibid.œ<br /><br />[v] Robert Duncan, “The Structure of Rime VIII,” in The Opening of the Field (New York: New Directions, 1960), 70.<br /><br />[vi] Kane, “Suppose What Is Left Behind,” 48.<br /><br />[vii] Olson, “Projective Verse,” 615.<br /><br />[viii] ibid., 616.<br /><br />[ix] Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, line 1424.<br /><br />[x] ibid., lines 1506-1507.dan remeinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330573992530221819.post-37818524694862711422009-06-11T21:57:00.005-04:002009-06-11T22:43:33.966-04:00rending the abyss radiant--lines into new projectsBelow is an example of the early postmodern abysmal whose highlighting of a certain radical modernism could and perhaps should be reassessed in terms of its capacities for pleasure. For, the opposition is not an alternative-less bind between the abyss and dread or hope and pleasure in [politically icky and irresponsible] transcendence and flight from the world (into the [gnostic] word). On the one hand, I simply want what I want to do when I read and write to feel good, and what I want to do is to disrupt and disturb the business as usual of the world, to demolish the mind resting falsely in a positivist 'method' and 'solution' which detects 'what happened' and explains (away) life and being. That is, I wish embrace in my poetry and wish to embrace in a poetics of scholarship as well as disruptive impulse, the impulse which understands that a document of civilization doubles as a document of barbarism and can no longer abide civilization and would never wish to produce a document of it. Especially in scholarship, where it comes with much more difficulty when one wishes to move beyond simply the 'themes' of one's work into its actual linguistic and poetic functions. Yet, at the same time, one must not simply turn from the abysmal and its dread, but understand it anew. In the time since 'early postmodernism'--the eptihet Paul Bové and the Boundary 2 collective saw fit to attach to the volume the quoataion below is taken from--some of us have probably learned that disruptive and radical modernism is all well and good, but that we simply need something to be fun. If there is, in fact, nothing, then we sure as hell need to make it bearable if not downright pleasurable. Radical ethics cannot abide an un-fun aescesis any longer. And yet, I for one would not give up on radical literary modernism, because, for one, I love its texts. The question is how to deal with the capacity of individuals, on the one had, to find the abyss not a gaping blackness but a radiant exhilaration, not an emptiness but rather a density of matter meaning nothing but feeling <span style="font-style: italic;">so</span>, and as well to deal with the dread of the abyss which still probably is lingering even if we take such pleasure in it. Anyways, here's the quote, from William V. Spanos, "The Detective and the Boundary," in <span style="font-style: italic;">Early Postmodernism: Foundational Essays</span>, Ed. Paul A. Bové (Durham, Duke U P, 1995), 38-39:<br /><br /><blockquote><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family:arial;">T<span style="font-size:100%;">he Western structure of consciousness is bent, however inadvertently, on unleashing chaos in the name of the order of a well-made world. If this is true, contemporary literature cannot afford the luxury of the symbolist, or , as I prefer to call it, the iconic literary aesthetic nor of its "postmodern" variants. For ours is no time for psychic flights, for Dedalean "seraphic embraces," however enticing they may be. Neither, for that matter, despite its more compelling claim as an authentic possibility, can it afford the luxury of the aesthetic implicit in the concept of the later Heidegger's </span></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:arial;font-size:100%;" >Gelassenheit</span><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:100%;"> (that receptivity which might disclose the Being of Not-being and thus the sacramental at-homeness of the non-at-home), the aesthetic of "letting-be" or, perhaps, of letting Being be, that Nathan Scott seems to be recommending in his important recent books, </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:arial;font-size:100%;" >Negative Capability</span><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:100%;"> and </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:arial;font-size:100%;" >The Wild Prayer of Longing</span><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:100%;">. For, in the monolithic well-made world that the positivistic structure of consciousness percieves--and perceiving, creates--it is the Detective who has usurped the place not only of God but of Being too as the abiding presence and, therefore, has first to be confronted.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:100%;">Our time calls for an existence-Art, once which, by refusing to resolve discords into the satisfying concordances of a telos, constitutes an assault against the art-ificialized Nature in behalf of the recovery of its primordial terrors. The most imeediate task, therefore, in which the contemporary writer must engage himself--it is, to borrow a phrase ungratefully from Yeats, the most difficult task not impossible--is that of undermining the detective-like expectations of the positivistic mind, of un-homing Western man, by evoking rather than purging pity and terror--anxiety. It must, that is, continue to </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:arial;font-size:100%;" >inconoclastic </span><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:100%;">revolutionbegun in earnest after World War II to dislodge or, to be absolutely accurate, to </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:arial;font-size:100%;" >dis-occident </span><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:100%;">the objectified modern Western man, the weighty, the solid citizen, to drive him out of the fictitious well-made world, not to gathered [and I, Dan, re-cite this allusion for Eileen Joy] into the "artifice of eternity," but to be exposed to the existential realm of history, where Nothing is certain. For only in the precincts of our last evasions, where "dread strikes us dumb," only in this silent realm of dreadful uncertainty, are we likely to discover the ontological and aesthetic possibilities of generosity.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:100%;">In this image-breaking enterprise, therefore, the contemporary writer is likely to find his "tradition," not in the "anti-Aristotelian" line that goes back from the Concrete poets to Proust, Joyce, and the imagists, Malarmé, Gautier, and Pater, but in the "Anti-Aristotelianism" that looks back from Beckett, Ionesco, and the Sartre of </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:arial;font-size:100%;" >Nausea </span><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:100%;">and </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:arial;font-size:100%;" >No Exit</span><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:100%;"> through the Eliot of </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:arial;font-size:100%;" >Sweeney Agonistes</span><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:100%;">, some of the surrealists, Kafka, Pirandello, Dostoevsky and the "loose, and baggy monsters" of his countrymen, Dickens, Wycherley and--with all due respect to the editor of the </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:arial;font-size:100%;" >Daily News</span><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:100%;">--the Shakespeare of </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:arial;font-size:100%;" >King Lear, Measure for Measure, </span><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:100%;">and the Ironically titled </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:arial;font-size:100%;" >All's Well that Ends Well,</span><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:100%;"> in which one of the characters says:</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><blockquote style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">They say mirales are past, and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.</span></blockquote><blockquote></blockquote></span></span></span></blockquote><blockquote></blockquote>Where does this line go before Shakespeare? Perhaps a number of writers are going to end up for various reasons on both sides of the line. Margery Kempe for being disruptive, but for having such a conventional narrative and submitting to the amanuensis, perhaps not. Julian, yes and no. The formal aspects of Langland's allegory--yes! spinning wildly out of control and dreams being accounting! But for his signature MEDIEVAL view of kingship and institutions, perhaps not. As for older material--the language of the Old English Riddles seem ripe for disrupting consciousness and knowledge in relation to poetics. What if guessing the right answer is not even secondary? Historiographical impossibility if one asserts the alterity and homogeneity of the middle ages. If not, capacity for a new historiographical poetics of modernism continuing in the 20th century.<br /><br />For the medievalist, or the poet who would listen to the medieval, it is a question of a historiography not interested in detecting what happened--in providing the solution, but of dividing the medieval to disturb the modern (so, of course, the both and of the continuity with the middle ages that the students of modernism the american academy still fear in almost any case because of its former association with a desire to affirm a continuity of christianity at the expense of the hard won virtues of humanisms in the renaissance--a la C.S. Lewis--; and the discontitunity associated with a Neitzschian 'genealogy' a la Foucault where history is not for knowledge but for cutting--a paraphrase I owe to former instructor at Pittsburgh Mark Lynn Anderson...again, both and on these counts). How does the medieval disrupt the well-made world, tear an abyss in its veil, in a way that burns with an intense pleasurable radiance, and not only with anxiety? What are the enticements of unhoming that the medieval can offer the modern, as a practice of modernism that I would like to continue today? And, where have these lovely statements and demands for poetics gone? And let medievalists start telling the poets what to do.dan remeinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330573992530221819.post-67044363931684602692009-06-10T00:35:00.004-04:002009-06-10T00:47:13.903-04:00dante and the housecat<div class="Section1"> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 166.5pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;">We drew near; and there were persons in the shade behind the rock, in postures people take for negligence.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 166.5pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 166.5pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;">And one of them, who seemed weary, was sitting embracing his knees, holding his face down low between them.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 166.5pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 166.5pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;">“O my sweet lord,” said I, “look at that fellow: he appears more negligent than if Laziness were his sister.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 166.5pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 166.5pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Then he turned to us and gave us his attention, shifting his face up a bit along his thigh, and said, “Now you go on up, you are so vigorous!”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 166.5pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 166.5pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Then I knew who he was and the pain that made my breath still come somewhat quickly did not prevent my going to him and when<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 166.5pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 166.5pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;">I reached him, he barely raised his head, saying: “Have you seen clearly how the sun drives his chariot over our left shoulder?”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 166.5pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 166.5pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;">His lazy movements and his brief words moved my lips a little; then I began: “Belacqua, now I do not grieve<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 166.5pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 166.5pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;">for you any longer; but tell me: why are you sitting just here? are you waiting for a guide, or have your old habits claimed you again?”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 166.5pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 166.5pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;">And he: “O brother, what good would climbing do? for the angel of God sitting on the threshold would not let me go in to the torments.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 166.5pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 166.5pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;">First it is necessary for the heavens to turn around me outside here as long as they did in my life, since I delayed my good sighs until the end,<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 166.5pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 166.5pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;">unless prayer helps me first, which must rise up from a heart that lives in grace: what good is any other, since it is not heard in heaven?”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 166.5pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 166.5pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;">And already the poet was climbing ahead of me and saying: “Come along now: see, the meridian is touched by the sun, and on the shore of ocean night already covers Morocco with its foot.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 166.5pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 166.5pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;">(Dante Alighieri, <i>Purgatorio </i></span><span style="font-size:10;"><span style="font-size:85%;">trans. Robert M. Durling, Oxford, 2003, Canto 3, 106-139,)</span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 166.5pt;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Dante’s Belacqua here is an old friend.<span style=""> </span>Unlike others in Purgatory, his laziness is paradoxically sanctioned and while he may be-moan it, Belacqua remains a point, for the poet, of bemusement, who smiles at(?) him. But Dante, I do not think, has much admonishment for the lounging pilgrim who remains still not quite in purgatory itself.<span style=""> </span>Ironically, the lazy one cannot go and lose his evil laziness by decree of God!<span style=""> </span>A figure of the humorously proto-purged, of the comic, of the one languorous—of poetic ease (Durling and Martinez’s notes call him “a<span style=""> </span>kind of parody of the contemplative live, of which an important part is study of the heavens”—and a good deal of Canto 3 is devoted to cosmology and geography, and Belacqua is observing the movement of the spheres...).<span style=""> </span>But of the modern?<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">And here, Beckett’s Belacqua, heads to a party brimming with medieval scholastic allusion: with a constituency of the ‘intelligentsia’ who discuss the Wife of Bath, among them a paleographer, on named the ‘Man of Law’ as his moniker for the narrative, one—who B. meets on his way there—is a French poet of a troubardourish sort “a high brow bromide of French nationality with a diabolical countenance compound of Skeat’s [yes, that’s right folks, <i>Skeat</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> mentioned in the highest of high modern literature, oh this is just too good!] and Paganini’s and a mind like a tattered </span><i>concordance</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> [italics mine]”; there is a reference to the Philologists Grimm, and a </span><i>femme fatale</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of the party whose name is, of all things </span><i>Alba</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. While the medieval allusions specifically populate the party, ironically, the medieval is inhabiting the modern all along in Belacqua himself, an odd sometime-suicidal bicycle-loving “creature” (Beckett uses this word) who literally dreams in French and likes eating toast so burnt it will hurt his mouth when smeared with the most stinky blue cheese imaginable while on his way to<span style=""> </span>study—that’s right—Italian by way of reading Dante with an old female scholar he imagines as his own private Beatrice in-the-\flesh.<span style=""> </span>And, he even likes reading the </span><i>Paradiso</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.<span style=""> </span>Belacqua has just been physically reprimanded for unknowingly (in a drunken stupor) throwing up on a policeman’s shoes:</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.5in;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Suddenly walking through the rain was not enough, stepping out smartly, buttoned up to the chin, in the cold and the wet, was an inadequate thing to be doing.<span style=""> </span>He stopped on the crow of Baggot Street bridge, took off his reefer, laid it on the parapet and sat down beside it.<span style=""> </span>The Guard was forgotten.<span style=""> </span>Stooping forward then where he sat and flexing his left until the knee was against his ear and the heel caught on the parapet (admirable posture) he took off his boot and laid it beside the reefer. Then he let down that leg and did the same with the other.<span style=""> </span>Next, resolved to get full value from the bitter no’-wester that was blowing, he slewed himself right round.<span style=""> </span>His feet dangled over the canal and he saw, lurching across the remote hump of lesson Street bridge, trams like hiccups-o’-the wisp.<span style=""> </span>Distant lights on a dirty night, how he loved them, the dirty low-church Protestant!<span style=""> </span>He felt very chilly.<span style=""> </span>He took off his jacket and belt and laid them with the other garments on the parapet.<span style=""> </span>He unbuttoned the top of his filthy old trousers and coaxed out his German shirt.<span style=""> </span>He bundled the skirt of the shirt under the fringe of his pullover and rolled them up clockwise together until they were hopped fast across his thorax.<span style=""> </span>The rain beat against his chest and belly and trickled down.<span style=""> </span>It was even more agreeable than he had anticipated, but very cold.<span style=""> </span>It was now, beating his bosom thus bared to the mean storm vaguely with marble palms, that he took leave of himself and felt wretched and sorry for what he had done.<span style=""> </span>He had done wrong, he realized that, and he was heartily sorry.<span style=""> </span>He sat on, drumming his stockingbird heels sadly against the stone wondering whence on earth could comfort spring, when suddenly the thought of the bottle he had brought pierced his gloomy condition like a beacon.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.5in;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.5in;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""> </span>(Samuel Beckett, “A Wet Night,” <i>More Pricks than Kicks, </i></span><span style="font-size:85%;">in <i>Samuel Beckett: The Centenary Edition, Vol. IV,</i></span><span style="font-size:10;"><span style="font-size:85%;">129)</span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I should note that we first meet Belacqua in the story “Dante and the Lobster,” which opens:</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 112.5pt;"><span style=""> </span><span style="font-size:85%;">It was morning and Belacqua was stuck in the first of the canti of the moon.<span style=""> </span>He was so bogged that he could move neither backward nor forward.<span style=""> </span>Blissful Beatrice was there, Dante also, and she explained the spots on the moon to him.<span style=""> </span>She shewed him in the first place where he was fault, then she put up her own explanation.<span style=""> </span>She had it from God, therefore he could rely on its being accurate in every particular.<span style=""> </span>All he had to do was to follow her step by step.<span style=""> </span>Part one, the refutation, was plain sailing.<span style=""> </span>She made her point clearly, she said what she had to say without fuss or loss of time.<span style=""> </span>But part two, the demonstration, was so dense that Belacqua could not make head or tail of it.<span style=""> </span>The disproof, the reproof, that was patent.<span style=""> </span>But then came the proof, a rapid shorthand of the real facts, and Belacqua was bogged indeed. Bored also, impatient to get on to Piccarda [since when is Belacqua impatient? only, only with Beatrice!<span style=""> </span>and who else would dare!].<span style=""> </span>Still he pored over the enigma, he would not concede himself conquered, he would understand at least the meanings of the words, the order in which they were spoken and the nature of the satisfactions that they conferred on the misinformed poet, so that when they were ended he was refreshed and could raise his heavy head, intending to return thanks and make formal retraction of his old opinion.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 112.5pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 112.5pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;">(Beckett, “Dante and the Lobster,” <i>More Pricks and Kicks</i></span><span style="font-size:10;"><span style="font-size:85%;">, 77)</span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Beckett’s Belacqua is in fact a student of Dante.<span style=""> </span>So much that the language here has him learning from Beatrice as much if not more than Dante himself, having the advantage of a text to go over and over <i>and</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> his Italian tutor, as opposed to just Beatrice’s oral instruction, however blissful and blessed.<span style=""> </span>That is, Belacqua is a kind of anachronism delightful to the kind of literary history I like—the kind I want to uncover as the literary history proper to a moderism with a radiant Middle Ages at its heart.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">For Dante, Belacqua should not be in the <i>Paradiso</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> learning from Beatrice at the same time as Dante—who would have B. still lazing around the very bottom of purgatory.<span style=""> </span>Perhaps, of course, by the time that Beckett and 20<sup>th</sup> century Ireland have come about (one with medievalists and paleographers and philologists!), Belacqua (chez Dante) will have made it at least up in the conical realms and perhaps all the way to the blessed city.<span style=""> </span>Yet, in that case, he should certainly not be stealing bicycles and walking stinking drunk in the rain in Dublin.<span style=""> </span>His conversion is lazy and late, but how can we possibly have so much ease, so much reluctance to give up on the worldly that it might even leech out into a 20<sup>th</sup> century version of himself?<span style=""> </span>Well, praise, for the trans-historical Belacquas!<span style=""> </span>For, Beatrice and Dante are “there” and only “there.”<span style=""> </span>Not, “there in the text” but “there.”<span style=""> </span>In the text, but the only text at the moment—the text of Belacqua, and in that one they are just ‘there.’<span style=""> </span>Also, Beatrice “shewed” all of her arguments—but in the very same past tense of the general narrative itself.<span style=""> </span>She may have ‘shewed’ them to Dante, but then she also shewed them to Belacqua during the time of this narrative here!<span style=""> </span>Huzzah for the poetics of anachronism!<span style=""> </span>Huzzah for Belacqua, the scholar of ease!<span style=""> </span>He takes off his shoes and raincoat, un-tucks his shirt, drinks, and eventually will show up to the party </span><i>anyway</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.<span style=""> </span>In the words of a David Byrne song I heard performed last night for free in Prospect Park: </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.5in;"><a href="http://www.everythingthathappens.com/"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>Everything that happens will happen today<o:p></o:p></i></span></a></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.5in;"><a href="http://www.everythingthathappens.com/"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>& nothing has changed, but nothing's the same<o:p></o:p></i></span></a></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.5in;"><a href="http://www.everythingthathappens.com/"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>and ev'ry tomorrow could be yesterday<o:p></o:p></i></span></a></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.5in;"><i><a href="http://www.everythingthathappens.com/"><span style="font-size:85%;">& and ev'rything that happens will happen today</span></a><o:p></o:p> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal">And then I look over and see Marge, my cat, dearest Margery Kempe-cat, who understands Dante, and Dante’s Belacqua, better than me, perhaps than Beckett, and just about anyone save maybe <a href="http://www.languages.uconn.edu/faculty/details.php?id=51">Franco Masciandaro</a>—the soft sleepy lazing <i>anti</i><span style="font-style: normal;">-purgatory of </span><i>ease</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> and pleasure, a purgatory under erasure, behold:</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKq6Fwz2PWHxlLjGRM2Jd8jvrpi49kxWpeFdl6boXGi3pXrib0J_j56bNF_RGZ5bKWpGQpJWnT9nSZyg80qO6Ho9QDGWTEgZXuW7Ll8c_B-dhtvtGRTHrs_BhwXMTib6emwhwnOPtu4bIa/s1600-h/DSC02664.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKq6Fwz2PWHxlLjGRM2Jd8jvrpi49kxWpeFdl6boXGi3pXrib0J_j56bNF_RGZ5bKWpGQpJWnT9nSZyg80qO6Ho9QDGWTEgZXuW7Ll8c_B-dhtvtGRTHrs_BhwXMTib6emwhwnOPtu4bIa/s320/DSC02664.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5345554716686026402" border="0" /></a></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> </div>dan remeinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330573992530221819.post-43191546141136842282009-06-03T19:37:00.002-04:002009-06-03T19:43:02.636-04:00glosses on secrets and purgativesHere is the latest from revision work on a prosimetric piece in progress called "new work: a prosimetrum" [apologies for the funny underlines and color in some of the endnotes, not sure why about that and wanting to post this!]:<br /><br /> <div class="Section1"> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">It has been determined by certain experts that there is ghost at work in this new work—in the poems or in the commentary? W.H. Auden’s poem “Family Ghosts” ends with the lines “and all emotions to expression come,/ Recovering the archaic imagery:/<span style=""> </span>This longing for assurance takes the form// Of a hawk’s verticle stooping from the sky.”<a style="" href="file://localhost/Users/danielremein/Documents/wraetlic%20prosimetrum1%20file.htm#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><span class="EndnoteCharacters"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[i]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span>In each movement to recover the work to come, to imagine the recovery of it, one who is on the ground might feel a gravitational pull from elsewhere arriving at, or emitting from, the writing body. A text may likewise be haunted.<a style="" href="file://localhost/Users/danielremein/Documents/wraetlic%20prosimetrum1%20file.htm#_edn2" name="_ednref2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[ii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Such moments turn us again to the origin of these poems and when they work as either lacking agency in time and space, or as multiple in their agencies. Nevertheless, some attendance to or cultivation of the text might better invite the ghosts to, felicitously, further compromise the agencies of these texts that are already not mine.<a style="" href="file://localhost/Users/danielremein/Documents/wraetlic%20prosimetrum1%20file.htm#_edn3" name="_ednref3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[iii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> There must be a work of conjuring, some ritual (and yet one proper to the writing of poems and commentaries and not to religions!).<span style=""> </span>Thus, Auden would later write of Iceland: “Europe is absent: this is an island and should be a refuge, where the affections of its dead can be bought/ by those whose dreams accuse them of being spitefully alive.”<a style="" href="file://localhost/Users/danielremein/Documents/wraetlic%20prosimetrum1%20file.htm#_edn4" name="_ednref4" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[iv]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> So ‘friends’ arrive to work on a book from various times.<span style=""> </span>We hide nothing from each other.<span style=""> </span>We un-hide each other. We resolve to write a series of warnings. This poem, which begins <i>all 500 breastplates</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, is a riddle caught up in the work of spectral un-hidings.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 2in; line-height: 150%;">all 500 breastplates</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 2in; line-height: 150%;">off-kilter and combat</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 2in; line-height: 150%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 2in; line-height: 150%;">distillery run amock</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 2in; line-height: 150%;">no help my netizen,</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 2in; line-height: 150%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 2in; line-height: 150%;">a passbook of</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 2in; line-height: 150%;">free greetings</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 2in; line-height: 150%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 2in; line-height: 150%;">no levers left anymore.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 2in; line-height: 150%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">The various fragments appear to consist of at least five different utterances, perhaps from difference speakers.<span style=""> </span>Or, there is no need to construct a narrative or a speaker, and the words are not spoken, but just jumble themselves on the page or the screen. The poem is in four stanzas.<span style=""> </span>Consider this the best way to divide the utterances, or don’t.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><i><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><b><i>breastplates</i></b><span style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;">: the radiant armor of a minor hope when all of the bloodlines are cut and a language is dulled by an infusion of combat readiness.<span style=""> </span>Such was the trouble of a young Perceval in Chrétien de Troye’s poem by the same name. The young boy mistakes </span><i>Chevaliers</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> for God, Demons, and Angels.<a style="" href="file://localhost/Users/danielremein/Documents/wraetlic%20prosimetrum1%20file.htm#_edn5" name="_ednref5" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[v]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> </span><b><i>distillery</i></b><span style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;">: see Samuel Beckett on Dante: “His conclusion is that the corruption common to all the dialects makes it impossible to select one rather than another as an adequate literary form, and that he who would write in the vulgar must assemble the purest elements from each dialect and construct a synthetic language that would at least possess more than a circumscribed local interest.”<a style="" href="file://localhost/Users/danielremein/Documents/wraetlic%20prosimetrum1%20file.htm#_edn6" name="_ednref6" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[vi]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span>But is a distillation necessary to get to the message of a missive as the solution to the riddle? or, if it is “distillery run amock,” then is the problem of distillation one which cannot help eliminate the need for breastplates?<span style=""> </span>Such distillery would need to occur in a transparent caldron, of a flame pleasurably bright.<span style=""> </span>The help for the netizen (see next comment) in language must burn just as brightly as the radiant screens on which we plot drone attacks on Afghanis from Nevada, and yet we still find ourselves in terms of purgatorial distillation is that peculiar modern condition which Beckett found in Joyce: “neither prize nor penalty, simply a series of stimulants to enable the kitten to catch its tail.<span style=""> </span>And the partially purgatorial agent? The partially purged.”<a style="" href="file://localhost/Users/danielremein/Documents/wraetlic%20prosimetrum1%20file.htm#_edn7" name="_ednref7" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[vii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Distillation as purgative in the modern world, as refining and purifying heat, is thus akin to the failed attempts of alchemy.<span style=""> </span>And even there, so often the search for the stone is more important than the transmutation it would produce.<span style=""> </span></span><b><i>netizen</i></b><span style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;">: this word advertised on the back of the dusk-jacket of the </span><i>Merriam-Websters</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span><i>Collegiate Dictionary</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> 10<sup>th</sup> Edition, in 1999, along with </span><i>netiquette</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, </span><i>spammer, face time, echinacea, fusion cuisine, feng sui, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">and </span><i>velociraptor</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.<a style="" href="file://localhost/Users/danielremein/Documents/wraetlic%20prosimetrum1%20file.htm#_edn8" name="_ednref8" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[viii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span>Thus the word registers as among a group which, when taken together, collect the bright hive of the internet as the radiantly new along with—among others—a notably ancient reptile so that what is caught in between are the mundane practices of human communication and food as their own luminousities. This is important to study of the work of this poem if one is to present the proper passbook and take her place among the shinning radiant breastplates of the first stanza.<span style=""> </span>These breastplates are hanging from the sprouting antlers of this poem and most of the others in this work.<span style=""> </span></span><b><i>free greetings</i></b><span style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;">: Do not mistake greetings for transparent communication. <span style=""> </span>The greeting of this poem is only the entrance into its commentary, which, though ‘below’ the poem as you now read it, might be just as well taking place into the unhinging between the paratactic syntax of </span><i>free greetings</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> with all its plenitude and the assertion(?). </span><b><i>no levers left anymore:</i></b><span style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;"> with is announcement of privation. This is the roomy dwelling space for our friendship in this poem—the space in which you or a literary ghost my be invited to take up an abode, such as a speechmaking </span><i>Beowulf</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> beginning to send a missive to his own friend, Hrothgar, in wearing perhaps not a breastplate but a </span><i>byrne </i><span style="font-style: normal;">(mail-coat) such that it is well-displayed as a smith’s work.<a style="" href="file://localhost/Users/danielremein/Documents/wraetlic%20prosimetrum1%20file.htm#_edn9" name="_ednref9" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[ix]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span>Such a space, like Beowulf’s missive, is in the this riddle itself and the room bounded off by its syntactic turns and gaps , radiant as the armor of its speaker, fearful or courageous.<span style=""> </span></span><i>no levers: </i><span style="font-style: normal;">here the lever is not a phallus, nor is it to be related to the phallic elevator lever about which the elevator operator has to complain in </span><i>The Great Gatsby </i><span style="font-style: normal;">to Mr. McKee to “keep your hands off the lever”—to which McKee replies, “I didn’t know I was touching it.”<a style="" href="file://localhost/Users/danielremein/Documents/wraetlic%20prosimetrum1%20file.htm#_edn10" name="_ednref10" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[x]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span>We lament, with the rise of the digital, the loss of the mechanical in our dwelling spaces, and would attempt to re-insert the mechanical into the secret of a poem’s radiance so as to not lose its memory. Without a level to pull, how can we unlock the mechanics of any riddle? Even if a digital inscription on the passbook of free greetings implores you </span><i>say what I am called</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.</span></p> </div> <div style=""><!--[if !supportEndnotes]--><br /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%"> <!--[endif]--> <div style="" id="edn1"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file://localhost/Users/danielremein/Documents/wraetlic%20prosimetrum1%20file.htm#_ednref1" name="_edn1" title=""><span class="EndnoteCharacters"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[i]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span> W.H. Auden, “Family Ghosts,” in <i>Collected Poems</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Modern Library, 2007), 41.</span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn2"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file://localhost/Users/danielremein/Documents/wraetlic%20prosimetrum1%20file.htm#_ednref2" name="_edn2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:35"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[ii]<!--[endif]--></span></ins></span></span></a><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:35"> </ins></span><span style=""> </span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:35">I am referring, of course, to Jacques Derrida’s <i>Specters of Marx</i></ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:35">,</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:39"> trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routeledge, 1994), </ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:51">yet</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:35"> </ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:51">(re?)</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:35">focusing the </ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:36">possibility</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:35"> of a hauntology not only on ‘the times’ or a particular </ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:36">individual</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:35"> and his relation to a past or a tradition (such as Derrida and </ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:36">the inheritance of ‘Marxism’), </ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:37">but additionally as a secular way to talk about the multiple non-human agencies and relations between texts—further obliterating the role of the poet in actually writing the poem—or the </ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:39">responsibility</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:37"> of the single mind (as genius) for a given work</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:52">—as what <i>works</i></ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:52"> in the space that disarticulates the opposition between all oppositions, past/present, literary history-literary/literary-present</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:53">, and for this, writer/reader, poem/commentary</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:37">.<span style=""> </span>What is working here is the work and what is haunted is the work by work.<span style=""> </span>From this point we can begin </ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:38">to try to think about how the work will get us into the world, rather than beginning with assumptions of facile relations between work and world (including that of work and poet or work and reader).<span style=""> </span></ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:37"><span style=""> </span></ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:41">For Derrida, the ghosts related to the anachrony of our readings and our inheritances of readings is exactly one path into the world, as “If it</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:43">—</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:41">learning </ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:43">to live—remains to be done, it can happen only between life and death.<span style=""> </span>Neither in life nor in death <i>alone</i></ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:43">. What happens between the two, and between all the “two’s” once likes, such as between life and death, can only <i>maintain</i></ins></span><i><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:44"> itself </ins></span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:44">with some ghost, can only </ins></span></span><i><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:44">talk with or about</ins></span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:44"> some ghost.<span style=""> </span>So it would be necessary to learn spirits.<span style=""> </span>Even and especially if this, the spectral, is </ins></span></span><i><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:44">not</ins></span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:45">...to learn to live </ins></span></span><i><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:45">with</ins></span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:45"> ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts.<span style=""> </span>To learn to live otherwise, and better.<span style=""> </span>no, not better, but more justly.<span style=""> </span>But </ins></span></span><i><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:46">with them</ins></span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:46">. (xvi-xvii).<span style=""> </span></ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:42"><span style=""> </span></ins></span><o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn3"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file://localhost/Users/danielremein/Documents/wraetlic%20prosimetrum1%20file.htm#_ednref3" name="_edn3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:56"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[iii]<!--[endif]--></span></ins></span></span></a><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:56"> </ins></span><span style=""> </span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:57">For Derrida, the relation to the ghost as inheritance </ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:58">“is never a given.<span style=""> </span>It is always a task. It remains before us just as unquestionably as we are heirs of Marxism, even before wanting or refusing to be, and, like all inheritors, we are in mourning.<span style=""> </span>In mourning in particular for what is called Marxism</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T19:59">” (</ins></span><i><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T20:00">Specters of Marx</ins></span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T20:00">, 67).<span style=""> </span></ins></span><o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn4"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file://localhost/Users/danielremein/Documents/wraetlic%20prosimetrum1%20file.htm#_ednref4" name="_edn4" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:29"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[iv]<!--[endif]--></span></ins></span></span></a><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:29"> </ins></span><span style=""> </span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:29">W.H. Auden, “Journey to Iceland,”<span style=""> </span>XXXXXXXXXXXX</ins></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn5"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file://localhost/Users/danielremein/Documents/wraetlic%20prosimetrum1%20file.htm#_ednref5" name="_edn5" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:36"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[v]<!--[endif]--></span></ins></span></span></a><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:36"> </ins></span><span style=""> </span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:36">See <i>Perceval ou le Conte du Graal</i></ins></span><i><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:38">, </ins></span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:38">Ed. Charles Méla,</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:36"> in </ins></span></span><i><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:36">Chrétien de Troyes: Romans</ins></span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:38"> (Paris: La Pochotèque, 1994), </ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:39">lines 121-169; or, in translation, </ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:40">see </ins></span></span><i><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:40">Perceval: the Story of the Grail</ins></span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:40">, in </ins></span></span><i><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:41">Chrétien de Troyes: Arthurian Romances</ins></span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:41">, trans. D. D. R. Owen (London: Everyman, 1993), lines 11</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:42">1</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:41">-185.<span style=""> </span></ins></span><o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn6"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file://localhost/Users/danielremein/Documents/wraetlic%20prosimetrum1%20file.htm#_ednref6" name="_edn6" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:47"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[vi]<!--[endif]--></span></ins></span></span></a><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:47"> </ins></span><span style=""> </span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:47">Samuel Beckett, “Dante...Bruno.Vico..Joyce,” in <i>Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition</i></ins></span><i><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:48"> Vol. 4: Poems, Short Fiction, Critcism</ins></span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:48"> (New York: Grove Press, 2006),</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:47"> 507</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:48">.</ins></span><o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn7"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file://localhost/Users/danielremein/Documents/wraetlic%20prosimetrum1%20file.htm#_ednref7" name="_edn7" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:54"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[vii]<!--[endif]--></span></ins></span></span></a><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:54"> </ins></span><span style=""> </span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:54">ibid., 510.</ins></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn8"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file://localhost/Users/danielremein/Documents/wraetlic%20prosimetrum1%20file.htm#_ednref8" name="_edn8" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:06"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[viii]<!--[endif]--></span></ins></span></span></a><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:06"> </ins></span><span style=""> </span><i><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:06">Merria</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:07">m</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:06">-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary</ins></span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T14:06">, 10<sup><span style=""><span style="">th</span></span></sup> ed., (Springfield, Mass: Merriam-Webster, 1999).<span style=""> </span></ins></span><o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn9"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file://localhost/Users/danielremein/Documents/wraetlic%20prosimetrum1%20file.htm#_ednref9" name="_edn9" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T15:09"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[ix]<!--[endif]--></span></ins></span></span></a><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T15:09"> </ins></span><span style=""> </span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T15:09">See <i>Beowulf</i></ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T15:09"> in </ins></span><i><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T15:12">Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburgh, </ins></span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T15:12">Ed. Fr. Klaeber 3<sup><span style=""><span style="">rd</span></span></sup> ed. (Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1950), line</ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-02T15:09"> 405-406.</ins></span><o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn10"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file://localhost/Users/danielremein/Documents/wraetlic%20prosimetrum1%20file.htm#_ednref10" name="_edn10" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T18:45"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[x]<!--[endif]--></span></ins></span></span></a><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T18:45"> </ins></span><span style=""> </span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T18:45">F. Scott Fitzgerald, <i>The Great Gatsby </i></ins></span><span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Daniel%20Remein" datetime="2009-06-01T18:46">(New York: Collier, 1992), 42.</ins></span><o:p></o:p></p> </div> </div> <div style=""><!--[if !supportAnnotations]--> <hr class="msocomoff" align="left" size="1" width="33%"> <!--[endif]--></div>dan remeinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330573992530221819.post-49419724840809405652009-05-16T23:38:00.018-04:002009-05-17T23:57:14.482-04:00how the new new middle ages will be a radiant modernism with a queer cowboy for its dean: kalamazoo 2009<blockquote style="font-family: courier new;">"A city of light is built on a cliffside.<br />The edge of the abyss is too damp.<br />The first birth has no memory."<br /><br /><strong>Tomaž Šalamun</strong></blockquote><br />Despite (although not, in order <span style="font-style: italic;">to spite</span>) a recent conversation with Jeffrey Cohen in which he declared that the colon/long title is dead, that the slash is the new colon, etc., I have titled this post with such a long title and a colon as above. It is a long post, and its not telelogically driving up to one point or presi about the conference. But I am trying to cultivate an ethos or an anticipation in it for a rough beast I think I feel (or at least want to feel) slouching towards a future kalamazoo, and a future middle ages.<br /><br />I have been meaning to post-kalamazoo blog since I returned, via car, from that 12 highway-hour pilgrimage; but alas, I was fated instead to endure a headcold that prevented me from thinking or writing anything so much as an email of a few lines until now. It is more than safe to say that I had a fantastic time, and that again I want to thank every one that is making medieval studies and the humanities in general a better place to be building, dwelling, and thinking. Folks involved in the BABEL swarm-singularity are all so beautiful I can barely even think of naming them all. But, new to Kalamazoo and comrade-in-scholarship at NYU Liza Blake pulled her share in making this year memorable, as did one Mo Pareles. One Julie O. (who has been making some waves in a conversation over at I<a href="http://inthemedievalmiddle.com/">n the Middle</a>) as well was a wonderful person to have met and to see happy to meet BABEL as well. As usual, the event and ensuing late-night frivoloty took its own toll on my wakefullness, which also delayed this post.<br /><br />So much of the discussion over at In The Middle has focused on discussions surrounding <a href="http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2009/05/while-i-was-counting-my-pleasures-i.html">pleasure and affect, stemming from a set of BABEL panels on pleasure and ethics in medieval scholarship,</a> that I think I would like to try to give shelter to another set of movements that were going on during the conference as well. These movements were not really a separate discussion from that of pleasure and ethics, but I want to remember them as in some way as a distinct thread of thought. §<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Radiance and Theory: A Phenomenology without Subject and Without Concept<br /><blockquote><span style=";font-family:arial;font-size:78%;" >Only God exists. Spirits are a phantom.<br />Blind shadows of machines concealing the Kiss.<br />My Death is my Death. It won't be shared<br />with the dull peace of others squashed beneath this sod.<br /><br />Whoever kneels at my grave--take note--<br />the earth will shake. I'll root up the sweet juices from<br />your genitals and neck. Give me your mouth.<br />Take are that no thorns piece your<br /><br />eardrums as your writhe, like a worm,<br />the living before the dead. Let this oxygen<br />bomb wash you gently. Explode you only<br /><br />so far as your heart will support. Stand up<br />and remmeber. I love everyone who truly knows me.<br />Always. Get up now. You've pledged yourself and awakened.<br /><br /><strong>Tomaž Šalamun, "epitatph"</strong></span></blockquote></span>These musings are trying to collect up a whole bundle of thoughts from talks given on various panels by Anna Klosowska, Eileen Joy, Nicola Masciandaro, Karl Steel, Mo Pareles, Eileen Joy, and Ethan Knapp. Really, what has perhaps prompted me the most is Ethan Knapp's assertion that theory is not dead, but that theory may not be or have ever been what we think it is. Namely, that 'Theory,' a la Derrida et. al., when it entered into the US academy in the 1960's, could only be admitted by making itself something that would fit into what was already going on. Thus, the Yale school allowed theory to be admitted into our departments, at the cost that it enter as being about--in the last analysis--language and only language. Really, the whole body of literature we might call the theoretical turn owed and owes an immense debt to phenomenology--a debt which had to be forgotten to gain admittance into american thought. So, in medieval studies, in continuing to do 'theoretical work' in this field, perhaps it is time to turn to theory as a turn to phenomenology as a way of thinking about conditions of possibility--which is to say a way of thinking about everything itself and not just to confine our thought to language. And, to do so is to admit into the project of medieval studies and literary criticism the capacity of doing philosophy itself--writing about the middle ages not just to produce some more knowledge about Chaucer or whoever, but as a whole alluring event, a philosophical event calling into the nearness the distances of the cosmos itself. Theory thus as events of life and not just events of language--as the path of language into the world and its events and appearances (and not as a way into the monad of consciousness a la Husserl--but into the split of that consciousness, always already at work as not in synch with itself, as Derrida discusses in his most early of books <span style="font-style: italic;">la Voix et le phénomène).</span><br /><br />I like this kind of phenomenology. As a way of getting back into the world. As a kind of event which forces a rupture in language so we can slip into a more pleasurable world. But I like this kind of phenomenology as well because I do not think it needs to be thought either with concepts or in terms of a subject whose presence and experience forms the sole site of arbitration for the happening of phenomenon. Phenomenology, rigorously understood, could be read as language about phenomenon--about what appears, or what happens. And, if Karl Steel's relentless and careful readings of animal's in the middle ages, especially as they are thought of at the moment of death and the moments of the apocalypse (at the very closing of cosmos itself!)--if this work teaches us anything, it certainly teaches us that all sorts of events have no need of a human subject in order to happen, or to matter. Last year, Karl gave a paper (if my memory serves me right) in which near the end he stated how he wanted to hold on to a particular moment of speculation, of hesitation, about the fate of animal bodies at the moment of the resurrection (what happens to ingested animals, etc.), as holding open the possibility of thinking the animal as animal, at its most animal, as animal first and last--and then lamenting that this medieval text quickly foreclosed this possibility. This year, Karl's work, I would say, held open that very possibility (thanks to Nicola Masciandaro for a good conversation that helped me piece this out), as pure poetry, and opening up the ringed space of the forgetting of the animal, while still keeping it ringed enough to be an open <span style="font-style: italic;">space</span>, to hear the very language of the animal at its most animal, for the animal.<br /><br />Anna Klosowska, in comments on a BABEL panel all about the place of pleasure in medieval studies (I will post my own preliminary remarks from this panel right after this post), called for scholarship without concepts, following Graham Harmon, and what she calls a post-abysmal way of thinking. This, and the babel of the animal the moment before its annihilation--these are the radiant events of a new phenomenology that will open out of contact with the middle ages. For Anna, we ended up--even before the pleasure panel, at the same panel as Karl's paper above--back at the moment of radiance in troubadour lyrics, with the figure of a lark weaving light--an intense radiance that seemed to me at once the poem as alluring jewel and the poem as luminous food, a feasting for the eyes and body in a burning heat. And this lead to a discussion later about burning up and purgatories. But this purgatory would not be purgative, would be the moment of ease. For, the figure of the poet or the intellectual as tortured genius has got to go--yes, it is still hanging around and it has got to go because we need to think the event of writing and the event of reading as these moments of radiance, or bearing witness to "the alchemical creation of the world." But how can we trust this radiance is not the shiny jewel of some demon ready to torment us back into being 19th century artists again?--more on this below.<br /><br />Additionally, in the SSHMA panel on Queering the Anglo-Saxon studies , Eileen Joy recast the queer possibility of incest in talking about the lives of Guthlac in an inordinate love of what is at hand, of what is closest: for her, the sibling, the sister. Yet, in this love, are we seeking an alternative to the asceticism or the masochism that we call queer perhaps all-too-delightfully in the lives of saints, in Foucault's lives of infamous men, in Foucault's <span style="font-style: italic;">cura sui</span> which he hoped would produce a kind of extra-discursive queer body? Or, do we find ourselves back in that bind: the queer self-abjecting; only in the self-denying, subject-destroying mode which is, my friends, the essence of the destructive practice of the religious (the re-bound, the re-read, the overdetermined, re-<span style="font-style: italic;">legio</span>)? "Can someone help me take the religion out of my queer sex, but not take the queer sex out of religion, because that's the most interesting part--and here we are back where we started" [qtd. from memory, open to correction] Joy asked. Again, we are stuck in this bind of wanting the pleasure, the event of pleasure, a phenomenology built around pleasure. Why not insert here a phenomenology of pleasure and not of a consciousness? This is perhaps how Mo Pareles' paper on the same panel, thinking about the Legion story from Mark in the OE gospels, worked so well with Eileen's paper. Mo's paper looked into those flows and swarms and multiplicities of the man inhabited by the demon who is called legio because he is many, and the demon's migration with Christ's permission in the swine. She asked about the queer contagion, still around now, of the multiple and the demonic, being tracked now across our nation as a swine flu that demands the closing of flows and borders, demanding singularities and not swarms (to clarify, Mo was not asking for the closing of borders, etc....those who fall to the usual fear of the queer contagion). What is the moment of this passage, in its medieval OE manifestation, that touches on the modern and brings with it the allure that draws into its nearness the queer scholar? How do we understand this event as a literary and philosophical event?<br /><br /><br />What I want to offer then instead as the locus of the phenomenon of such a phenomenology is a kind of radiance, a kind of intensity. Not a replacement for the human subject in new clothes: I am not talking about you or me, not about conscious things. I am thinking about the happy coincidence of matter and matter in such an intense way that a kind of radiance happens, that a kind of gravitational allure occurs which then in turn just might allow a critical mass of consciousness to snag on it, to cooperate in a moment of bliss. If we are then going to talk about the responsibility or the ethics of this phenomenon, if we want to ask about whether the affects of the alluring are always good or always feel good, we need to ask why we want to ask about responsibility in the first place. Whose responsibility, and to what or to whom--to possibility?<br /><br />That is, this is a moment of radiance 'beyond good and evil' that I would be after. The moment here is beyond the movements that have been reading--since its inception with Rimbaud et. al.--of literary modernism as the final movement of pessimism. Rather, this intense moment of the phenomena as alluring radiance, as the threshold of life and ecstasy, is perhaps the importance of modernism. Modernism as a supreme radiance, or desire for radiance. Where my collaborator Anna Klosowska would see Heidegger as the epitome of the modern that needs to be gotten beyond as the abysmal, I might actually re-incribe as within this radiance: right at the hear of a modernity and a literary modernism--especially where it contacts the medieval (in Pound's first Canto, in Eliot's Quartets, in early Auden, in DADA etc.).<br />§<br /><br />For example, let's take a epitomizing piece of high modernity, a ready-made (that most depraved elegance of dysfunctional and disruptive modernist art--for the true parts of modernism were not the shoring of fragments against one's own ruins, but the lichens and freezes leeching into the ruins themselves, cracking the remainders of the past to dust not to eliminate it, but so we could ingest it and truly live AS the past!--pace the poetry of Pound, HD, prose of Stein, the saison en enfer, etc. See <span style="font-weight: bold;">Charles Bernstein, <span style="font-style: italic;">A Poetics, "Pounding Fascism" et. al.</span></span>) that I discovered while I was washing with my dishes the other day, in the form of an upside-down ramekin which I later placed on a nice rug in my living room for the sake of a digital photo:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMzXE6qQScnZ1dhhz5EGzj9y9WA9xmxuI-tTewT-sllnWq1R8xbny4MrR7JNBqCugr4OVTEuVMqb9p-a2loiGfwzlid6diMdGBXhrbEgYqHiatuKUNaGDFkaGwQ-zhaeXoDFukDhpcbNSO/s1600-h/DSC02604.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMzXE6qQScnZ1dhhz5EGzj9y9WA9xmxuI-tTewT-sllnWq1R8xbny4MrR7JNBqCugr4OVTEuVMqb9p-a2loiGfwzlid6diMdGBXhrbEgYqHiatuKUNaGDFkaGwQ-zhaeXoDFukDhpcbNSO/s200/DSC02604.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5336914652864241954" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br />HIC PORCELAIN it says. HERE PORCELAIN I think immediately of Nicola Masciandaro's paper his year at Kalamazoo which amounted to a phenomenology of decapitation, and ended with the voice of st. Edmund's head in the story of St. Edmund, calling out here, here, here, so people can find it, cradled by a hungry wolf who guards the head from the other beasts. A moment of tenderness, of event-ness in the sheer impossibility of the king decapitated and talking, with the greedy wolf cradling the disjunction of its being cut-off and its open mouth gaping open the space-time of différance at the where its most poetic of voices is produced: HIC PORCELAIN. Here. This. Here, this modenity, here, this middle ages. Thus event happening as the poetry of a HERE whose (perhaps unintentonal?) latin calls into nearness the scholarly language of a middle ages as it meets up so contingently with the high modernist 'ready made' so-decreed by the whim of a tired scholar washing his dishes on a spring evening in 2009 in Brooklyn, NY.<br /><br />The ramekin is a perfectly brightening and glowing event, beckoning waves of allure into its radiant gravitational reach. HERE, PORCELAIN. Autodeictic and autoindexical movement, the bottom of the ramekin, usually hidden, calls to no one and to everyone that turns it over to tell us what we already know and tell it to us with its stamped on text HIC PORCELAIN, a mix of Latin preposition and modern English noun, already a labeled museum piece for the anthropology of a future excavating our most serious of culinary endeavors (crème brûlée, for example, a stamped HIC hiding under the crisp caramelized top, the creamy middle, the ceramic under-layer--for a crème brûlée involves the ramekin as well!--and facing the normal force of the table which upholds it!). <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwOcLbIeyp3Fme-3u_CVxXU6e7aP8WvTVqrulCFQGcAMIErQFcl_cjDaV88Y51jsJhHlI7cF0MIUqvj1KjyZPA_7Dt0xex-NmBsbk5_WJMiWh4BPbNbCjP5H_u5XX-UWrbNxOfI27iZq4N/s1600-h/DSC02607.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwOcLbIeyp3Fme-3u_CVxXU6e7aP8WvTVqrulCFQGcAMIErQFcl_cjDaV88Y51jsJhHlI7cF0MIUqvj1KjyZPA_7Dt0xex-NmBsbk5_WJMiWh4BPbNbCjP5H_u5XX-UWrbNxOfI27iZq4N/s200/DSC02607.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5336915123615528754" border="0" /></a> Remember what C.S. Lewis wrote in his <span style="font-style: italic;">Discarded Image, </span>even if he is stilted in his historiography: "One gets the impression that medieval people, like Professor Tolkien's Hobbits, ejnoyed books which told them what they already knew" (200). <span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>This THIS, this HERE, this HIC PORCELAIN calls to no one, does not need us, but pulls us into its radiance as a visual event of the poem when washing dishes and suddenly things, objects, MATTER itself can call out to the living, invite us to live with it, and radiate with it, in the threshhold of matter and life.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivlQTwohlhsuaYAVdBu_5AmkYvWhxPhY9rJqaywA6DW_2kKU_mpRytV0q-GEkAurTNCZFTlA_ZpgT6BJ1_572rgs_CsGNQm_5asoRq4slZxGoNLUnH6jdsBg57Im7DPWaARL9oehtqqE87/s1600-h/DSC02611.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivlQTwohlhsuaYAVdBu_5AmkYvWhxPhY9rJqaywA6DW_2kKU_mpRytV0q-GEkAurTNCZFTlA_ZpgT6BJ1_572rgs_CsGNQm_5asoRq4slZxGoNLUnH6jdsBg57Im7DPWaARL9oehtqqE87/s200/DSC02611.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5336915301094589490" border="0" /></a> This is what a medieval medieval studies, a disruptively modernist medieval studies could do under the sway of a new phenomenology which would demand a NEW INDEXICALITY (see Derrida's chapters on the index in Husserl in <span style="font-style: italic;">la Voix et le phénomène</span>)--poems for papers and films for bibliographies. Love-ins for the queer university which is not a place or an institution but a incestuously auto-indexical event that happens at any school [and this came up in the BABEL panel on Ethics, with thanks to Carolyn Anderson on making space for the queer reader in the classroom even in cowboy boot Wyoming,, and more tangentially with papers on the coercive possibilities of language in writing and teaching...].<br /><br />Thus literary modernism as a moment of our relatively more recent past is perfect as it calls to us and to the medieval as well, as a moment we are still not getting despite its passing late last century--as a moment as infinitely distant and near to us at the same time as the medieval has always been--they shine brightly forth in that which just happens, HERE.<br /><br /><br />I know this is full of rambling. more systematic, or at very least more lucid thoughts to follow in the next few days and weeks on more specific thoughts on what this radiance is, where it happens, and where it pulls us into our medievale future.dan remeinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330573992530221819.post-57330991684802447932009-05-03T01:29:00.004-04:002009-05-03T01:42:15.733-04:00more while expecting kalamazoo...<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><b>Here is the paper, finally, from the <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://glossator.org/">Glossator</a> </span>conference in April at the CUNY graduate center. The final roundtable with Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, David Greetham, Jesús Velasco, and Avital Ronell, with introductory remarks and questions from Nicola Masciandaro, can be heard<a href="http://media.switchpod.com/users/glossator/FutureofCommentaryRoundtable.mp3"> here.<br /></a></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><b>Affects and Their Gravities: Commentary as a Capacity of Care<o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><b><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><b>1.<span style=""> </span>Commentary and Secular Sense <o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>Wai Chee Dimmock, ostensibly an Americanist, has argued for “literature as a democratic institution, vibrant and robust.”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[i]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span>Alternately, she finds literary culture a kind of slow moving “civil society”: “an unusually fine grained and lasting one, operating on a scale both too large and too small to be fully policed by the nation-state.”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_edn2" name="_ednref2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[ii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span>For Dimmock, the literary as such “is not an attribute resident in a text, but a relation, a form or entanglement, between a changing object and a changing recipient, between a tonal presence and the way it is differently heard over time.”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_edn3" name="_ednref3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[iii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Literature, “is thus an object with an unstable ontology, since a text can resonate only insofar as it is touched by the effects of its travels.”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_edn4" name="_ednref4" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[iv]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> The literary is thus a relation.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>We could, already, at a conference like this, apply certain epithets to this relation in a manner facile (yet perhaps needful)—understanding the literary as commentary, the act of translating which enables much of the movement of this society through deeper time as a kind of commentary.<span style=""> </span>And we would in so doing deepen our understanding of commentary, of what we call the ‘literary.’ Yet, following this relation into moments of its manifestation will bring us to a strange territory:<span style=""> </span>one that our classical notion of worldly civil society—one for and in <i>this</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> world—cannot, for all that, account for.<span style=""> </span>Such a sense of the literary which, as relation we would call commentary, through deep time, would include strange phenomena.<span style=""> </span>For instance, as Dimock enumerates, “Translation—the movement of a corpse by a vehicle driven by someone other than himself, and the movement of a text by a vehicle driven by something alien—unites the living and the dead in a gesture steeped in mortality and inverting it, carrying it on.”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_edn5" name="_ednref5" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[v]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span>Dimock is thus willing to admit that to acknowledge the sense which emerges from such a relation comes with a certain risk—as we knowledge that the literary as relation (between us, here, but also but also in meaningful relations with the dead) we must also acknowledge its filiations with the content and structure of religions and the religious.<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_edn6" name="_ednref6" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[vi]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span>Just as Jean-Luc Nancy must acknowledge that politics (specifically the politics of democracy) in its history as the “renewed aporia of a religion of the </span><i>polis</i><span style="font-style: normal;">” must go the way of fundamentalist theocracy or follow a radical “reinvention, perhaps, of what </span><i>secularity </i><span style="font-style: normal;">means,” so too commentary (if we take it as a literary relation), like politics, must “assume a dimension it cannot integrate for all that, a dimension that overflows it, one concerning an ontology or an ethology of “being-with,” attached to absolute excedence [</span><i>excédence absolue</i><span style="font-style: normal;">] of sense and passion for sense for which the word </span><i>sacred</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> was but the designation.”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_edn7" name="_ednref7" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[vii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> How might we gloss of this sense of being-with, trembling within what we call commentary?<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>Heidegger’s thinking on the structure of <i>Mitda-sein</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (being-together) as a structure equiprimordial with Dasein stands out from his analysis of Care as a fundamental structure of Dasein in Part 1 of </span><i>Sein und Zeit</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, to the point that Being-with or Being-together would be necessary for our being itself.<span style=""> </span>I would offer this sense of Care which determines being-with as a gloss on a possible ground of an “ethology of ‘being-with’”:<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in; line-height: 200%;">Since being-in-the world is essentially care, being-together-with things at hand could be taken in our previous analyses as <i>taking care</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of them, being with the </span><i>Mitda-sein</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of others encountered within the world as </span><i>concern</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.<span style=""> </span>Being-together-with is taking care of things, because as a mode of being-in it is determined by its fundamental structure, care.<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_edn8" name="_ednref8" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[viii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> (180) <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">To invoke this concept of Care is to assert that one’s being can only emerge as already oriented towards the Being-together <i>of</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> others that involves taking care of things.<span style=""> </span>Being together thus involves a taking-care-of-things-together. It is this concept of Care, I would contend, which could provide access to the new kind of secularity that literature as civil society (as a way of Being-together) would need in its theoretical enunciation: a way of understanding how literary practices—specifically those of commentary—are caught up in the practices that simultaneously produce and consist of the sense of the </span><i>mysterium</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> being-together [the glosser participates in a society across time addressing herself to the text, the author, and previous glossers at the same time that she squeezes the sense out of a line of verse in bringing the stylus to the margin]. I would thus link commentary as Care to an ethos of Being-with while at same time reckoning with the resemblance of such a sense-producing structure to the production of sense proper to religions by locating its manifestation in the radically worldly and mundane practices of reading and writing (commentary).<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>According to Heidegger’s conceptualization, Care appears equiprioridally with Being itself, resulting in the practice of taking care of things as part of one’s reactionary and determined responses to the thrown-ness of finding oneself being-in the <i>Mitdasein</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of others.<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_edn9" name="_ednref9" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[ix]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Even so, this formulation of Care inextricably links Being-together to the possibility of the appearance of the mysterium of Being at all: “The being of Da-sein means being-ahead-of-onesself-already-in (the world) as being-together-with (innerworldly beings encountered).<span style=""> </span>This being fills in the significance of the term </span><i>care</i><span style="font-style: normal;">...”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_edn10" name="_ednref10" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[x]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Care is a fundamental structure, not the result of conscious or appropriative practice. But when commentary might be understood as a taking care of things (texts) together (together because glossers will inevitably add to and argue with each other across time and space while they fill up the margins of a given text) then the question could then be posed—as we </span><i>are</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> together at a conference on commentary: can concrete practices of taking-care-of-things-together contain the possibility of producing </span><i>in reverse</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> the kind of exceedence I would ascribe to Care? I would offer the remainder of this paper, a commentary on two short sections from a contemporary poem, to risk attempting what must amount to that impossible heresy.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><b>2.<span style=""> </span>Commentary on two lines from “Daughter” by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_edn11" name="_ednref11" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[xi]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 45pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-size:10;"><b>from part one, “Dream”:<o:p></o:p></b></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in -0.5in 0.0001pt 45pt;"><span style="font-size:10;">An angel swims silently to a flat rock in the night, where seabirds are sleeping, senses them,<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in -0.5in 0.0001pt 45pt;"><span style="font-size:10;">and stops.<span style=""> </span>Their recognizing her in the moonlight, without waking, is the physical sensation of meaning<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in -0.5in 0.0001pt 45pt;"><span style="font-size:10;">of your dream, when you awake.<span style=""> </span>The birds’ dream represents an angel, and later it shelters the meaning,<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in -0.5in 0.0001pt 45pt;"><span style="font-size:10;"><i>angel</i></span><span style="font-size:10;">.<span style=""> </span></span><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">Berssenbrugge’s poems, like this one, charge the line with a task of generously exhausting her readers—pushing them into a game of remembering as one reels further and further towards the right margin. They can be for this reason, very forgettable lines—hard to call up and quote, but nonetheless leaving a reader with a residue of specific affects. These lines open a scene in which a swimming angel can sense.<i><o:p></o:p></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>The birds, sleeping, recognize the angel, and this recognition forms something of a ‘phenomenological correlative,’ to recognize in this line something akin to Eliot’s objective correlative even if it will open onto these secular literary aesthetics. The dream of the birds, within the dream of the poem (so-named by the section heading “dream”) does the work of a language, <i>representing</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> an angel, sheltering the meaning </span><i>angel</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, and unfolding, even as an ethereal dream within the fiction of a poetic dream, a ‘physical sensation of meaning,’ except that unlike Eliot’s figure, here the </span><i>sense </i><span style="font-style: normal;">is not </span><i>conveyed</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> with reliance on an image.<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_edn12" name="_ednref12" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[xii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span>Instead, the poem-commentary insists, sense is literarily and physically sheltered by the sound of the poem pronounced, and sheltered by a dream—as if the dream, as a wish or a desire, were also a physical phenomon in the world of the dream within the dream, pulling the angel towards itself, a gravity of affect pulling in and giving shelter to the meaning, even in an echo of itself after the dream is over.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>The very first line physically works to shelter this sense, dissipating the s-sounds throughout the line, so that the angel’s approach, <i>silently</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span><i>swims</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, is, physically, intimate with the very word ‘sense’ when the line is audibly pronounced.<span style=""> </span>The physical feeling of the </span><i>s</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> anticipates </span><i>sense</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> before its arrival, but also helps to shelter it in the memory of the reader or listener as sound physically ties the end of a long line to its beginning, helping one to remember the sense of the long line.<span style=""> </span>This “physical sensation of meaning’ consists in a recognition without waking—a dreaming within a dream which recognizes what is outside of the dream, but, impossibly, without breaching the boundary of the dream—giving the shelter of the dream over to itself on the condition that it shelter more than just dream (ie. meaning), even as what it contains (the meaning </span><i>Angel</i><span style="font-style: normal;">) is within the ‘dream’ of the poem, but outside the dream of the birds inside the poem.<span style=""> </span><b>§<o:p></o:p></b></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.75in; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-size:10;"><b>from part 2 “Commentary”:<o:p></o:p></b></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in -0.25in 0.0001pt 0.75in;"><span style="font-size:10;">The dream represents a meaning to me.<span style=""> </span>Then it’s a structure that shelters the meaning.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in -0.25in 0.0001pt 0.75in;"><span style="font-size:10;">My emotion can represent an evaluation or contain one, of interaction between an etheral object<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in -0.25in 0.0001pt 0.75in;"><span style="font-size:10;">and an organism.<span style=""> </span>The angels bows down.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in -0.25in 0.0001pt 0.75in;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">The commentary opens itself by saying what the dream is doing.<span style=""> </span>It does this in the form of lineated verse—verse of a long line, almost resembling prose, yet failing to reach all the way to the right margin despite coming quite close. The commentary establishes a temporal order for what the dream does (we must hold in reserve the question of which dream?):<span style=""> </span>first, it represents.<span style=""> </span>then, it <i>is</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (a structure that shelters the meaning). Either the form of the two sentences of this first line is not parallel, or the being of the dream is considered its activity by the end of the first line. The dream thus has its being in </span><i>sheltering.</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> The difference between representation and being is quite significant. The dream </span><i>is</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> a structure that shelters the meaning.<span style=""> </span>Now, what sort of structure is it?<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>Dimmock reminds us, as she explains her privileging of the audible over the visual in her theory of the literary relation, that “Literary study makes a large provision for the unvisualizable,”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_edn13" name="_ednref13" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[xiii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> and I might offer this moment as such a instance of that provision.<span style=""> </span>What kind of structure shelters a meaning?<span style=""> </span>If the meaning has moved into the very operations of ontology, it is a meaning whose being is in its very relation, in its unfolding as unveiling.<span style=""> </span>The shelter of such a delicate creature would then surely be strange.<span style=""> </span>Yet even though I would desire philosophical rigor for this paper in the last instance, I am really dealing with <i>poësis,</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> a poësis which is prior to any philosophy—so we will dare to </span><i>name </i><span style="font-style: normal;">what is strange. To do so we must venture out of our text briefly because it is only later in the poem where we read that what is contained in the dream, the scene of the dream (rocks, angel, birds, etc.) is “like a stage set” (Part 2, 2<sup>nd</sup> complete stanza).<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_edn14" name="_ednref14" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[xiv]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span>A stage, as the marking off of a limit which is nonetheless an opening—an enclosure whose function it is to open for the audience, an open circle—a structure which functions to allow an event to occur from inside which overfills it and brings the audience into relation with it as the event of a theater, a figure (</span><i>pace </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Nancy on Gérard Granel) operating in the mode, of “the simultaneity of the open and the ringed...the simultaneity of the void and the divided out”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_edn15" name="_ednref15" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[xv]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>The claim of the second line opens the possibility of a vacillation between representating and sheltering, or, containing, but with respect to an emotion.<span style=""> </span>This similarity to the relations of the first line suggests the possibility that the dream is, or at least can operate in the manner of, an emotion—the history of dream as wish-fulfillment underscores this possibility—the dream as desire. The desire is not in itself an evaluation, but can contain one.<span style=""> </span>This is the relation between a being (an organism) and an ethereal object (the literary).<span style=""> </span>A desire then operates here as the stage of, or the scene of, the intellection.<span style=""> </span>The affective lien between a being and the literary shelters the sense of that relation. The poet-exegete identifies a shelter within the text and cares for it—even while taking shelter in it among the other readers that will encounter this shelter.<span style=""> </span>Her and our commentary Cares for this shelter, expanding it without compromising its uniqueness—making it available to a community on the condition of maintaining its singular texture.<span style=""> </span>This Care is not the Anxious care of the religious for the sacred word worth more than the World [Heidegger’s Care too suffers under <i>Angst</i><span style="font-style: normal;">], not the gnostic privileging of Word over World which the literary as a civil relation, a conference on commentary, or any civil gathering around any text constantly risks practicing. As sheltering, commentary could operate as a practice of giving the world back to itself in its very worldiness.<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>For the shelter to undergo the circumspection of commentary and yet continue to function as a shelter of meaning it must somehow be able to be given back itself and its sheltering. This sheltering and what it draws towards itself (in terms of the sense of the poem) as well as the preservation of this sheltering (which any commentary on it would require) thus provokes a relation that is the very meaning of Heidegger’s Care: “the possibility of a concern which does not so much leap in for the other as <i>leap ahead</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of him, not in order to take “care” away from him, but to first to give it back to him as such.”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_edn16" name="_ednref16" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[xvi]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span>This poem’s own gloss on itself, if it is to care for itself, cannot simply open up this shelter and grasp at or gaze on the meaning that the shelter shelters, but must leap ahead of the poem’s own appearance so that it give back to the poem the event of its sheltering. The poet-exegete moves and thinks and </span><i>is</i><span style="font-style: normal;">-with all of these events in the dream which operates as a stage that opens for the performance of the poem—a shelter which, once given it back to itself so that meaning be immanent in its sheltering, exerts such a gravity so as to make our sheltering of the poem’s sheltering possible, and in turn<span style=""> </span></span><i>our </i><span style="font-style: normal;">gloss, </span><i>our </i><span style="font-style: normal;">meaningful being-with.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%;">At the end of our text, the Angel bows down.<span style=""> </span>The Angel seems to have escaped from the dream and into the commentary.<span style=""> </span>The angel tends to the sheltering, bows <i>in the commentary to the sanctuary of sense </i><span style="font-style: normal;">that, being literary, can only be (in the first instance) felt or heard.<span style=""> </span>Again, the </span><i>dream</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> first sheltered the meaning, “angel,” a thing that outside of it, bows down, as part of its commentary. The poem, at least the part of it which consists of the dream, </span><i>is not</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> unless the angel </span><i>is</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, and </span><i>is </i><span style="font-style: normal;">in such a way that it tends to the poem’s sheltering of sense as part of the commentary to the dream. The Angel is not only the dramatization, but also the literal event of the poem’s leaping ahead of both the sheltering and the meaning sheltered even within the topology and vocabulary of the poem itself so it can infinitely give itself back to itself. This angel is then not a religious worshipper, not bowing out of penitence or unworthiness, but in following and attending to, indeed leaping ahead of and sheltering, the affective gravity of the Being-with of the </span><i>poem as commentary</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> in which it has its being. Something of this being-with escapes itself while still remaining worldly and finite—escapes the finite figure of the dream which nonetheless somehow shelters the infinite sense that resounds in the impossible space and movement of the Angel between the inside and the outside of the dream.<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_edn17" name="_ednref17" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[xvii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span>The success of the poem’s commentary on its own dream/desire depends on the preservation of this finite structure which shelters sense exceedent enough for an Angel from within the dream to bow to it.<span style=""> </span>This is a capacity of the literary Dimock describes as the ability for tiny details of a text to shelter global relations through deep time: “These two—finite parameters and infinite unfolding—go hand in hand.<span style=""> </span>The latter is embedded in the former, coiled in the former [I might say, sheltered by]...Scalar opposites here generate a dialectic that makes the global an effect of the grainy.”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_edn18" name="_ednref18" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[xviii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span>This careful and circumspect bringing out of almost infinite sense out of finite figures might be seen as a concept of commentary itself as the ‘spice’ or “savor of the significance of the text” (as Nicola Masciandaro would say).<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_edn19" name="_ednref19" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[xix]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> But it need not be glossed as a religious exegesis of transcendent sense.<span style=""> </span>Rather, I would gloss this relation of Care as the very relation of commentary, infinitely leaping ahead of the shelter so as to give the shelter back to itself in its sheltering (here, in the <i>mise en abîme</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of the exe-poësis which, despite what it is, escapes itself to bring us in turn, outside of the poem, into the same relation, pulling us together into the shelter of its auto-commentary): a capacity for which, while </span><i>remaining secular</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, a secular structure cannot keep account; a tending to the sense which, given back to itself, exceeds itself—the relation to the infinite that we are first drawn to by a finite dream, or even a desire for the finite entity of a poem bursting </span><i>out from</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span><i>exegesis</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <span style=""> </span>Giambattista Vico’s etymology of <i>lex</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (for </span><i>law</i><span style="font-style: normal;">) famously explains the term as referring initially to a gathering of acorns, then as a gathering of vegetables or crops, and finally “a collection of citizens, or the public parliament” from which gathering of </span><i>lex </i><span style="font-style: normal;">or law gives way again to the gathering of letters into the </span><i>legere</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of reading.<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_edn20" name="_ednref20" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[xx]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a> This etymology, no matter how inventive, importantly roots reading in a practice emerging from a civil way of being-together.<span style=""> </span>Literature operates as a </span><i>lex</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> alternative to the compulsory civil gathering of nations—but as a relation, one which gathers not only letters—where the civil gathering, rather than making the literary possible, is made possible and in fact manifested imminently in the literary.<span style=""> </span>Commentary tends to this gathering-relation as being-together—across time and in a secular space, in the absence of the scribe and/or the receiver—, promotes it in reverse of the Heideggerian schema with which I began this essay, gathers beings into a secular order arising co-extensively with its sense in the shelter of commentary.<span style=""> </span>Commentary tends to an alternative </span><i>lex</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, not only alternate to the nation-state Dimock wisely wants out of, but also in its capacity to include sense in that order of being-together. Commentary: a secular practice of being-together, which can assume a dimension of sense.<br /><br /></span><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_ednref1" name="_edn1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;"><span style="">[i]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> Wai Chee Dimock, “A Theory of Resonance,” <i>PMLA </i></span><span style="font-size:10;">(March 1999):1060.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span> <div style="" id="edn2"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_ednref2" name="_edn2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[ii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> Wai Chee Dimock, <i>Through Other Continents:<span style=""> </span>America Literature Across Deep Time</i></span><span style="font-size:10;"> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 8.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn3"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_ednref3" name="_edn3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[iii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> Dimock, “Theory of Resonance,” 1064.<o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn4"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_ednref4" name="_edn4" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[iv]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> ibid., 1061.<o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn5"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_ednref5" name="_edn5" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[v]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> Dimock, <i>Through Other Continents, </i></span><span style="font-size:10;">16.<o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn6"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_ednref6" name="_edn6" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[vi]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> ibid. Dimock refers to World religions as “well established phenomenon, one of the most durable and extensive on earth,” 23.<o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn7"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_ednref7" name="_edn7" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[vii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> Jean-Luc Nancy, “Opening,” in <i>Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity</i></span><span style="font-size:10;">, trans. Bettina Bergo et. al. (NY: Fordham University Press, 2008), 3.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn8"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_ednref8" name="_edn8" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[viii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> Martin Heidegger, <i>Being and Time: A Translation of </i></span><span style="font-size:10;">Sein und Zeit, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 180.<o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn9"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_ednref9" name="_edn9" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[ix]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> Cf. Heidegger, <i>Being and Time</i></span><span style="font-size:10;">, §38 “Falling Prey and Thrownness,” §26 “The <i>Mitda-sein</i></span><span style="font-size:10;"> of the Others and Everyday Being-with,” and §27 “Everyday Being One’s Self and the They,” on authentic Being and the everyday “leveling” of being or falling of discourse into idle talk, into which “Da-sein is <i>disperesed </i></span><span style="font-size:10;">in the they and must first find itself” (p.121), those passages part of those themes of Heidegger so misread by Sartre. <o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn10"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_ednref10" name="_edn10" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[x]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> Heidegger, <i>Being and Time</i></span><span style="font-size:10;">, 179-180.<o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn11"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_ednref11" name="_edn11" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[xi]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, “Daughter,” in <i>I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems</i></span><span style="font-size:10;"> (Berkley: University of California Press, 2006), 77-79.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn12"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_ednref12" name="_edn12" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[xii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> Cf. F.O. Mathiessen, “The ‘Objective Correlative<i>,</i></span><span style="font-size:10;">” and “The Auditory Imagination,” in <i>The Achievement of T.S. Eliot: An essay on the Nature of Poetry</i></span><span style="font-size:10;"> (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968).<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn13"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_ednref13" name="_edn13" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[xiii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> Dimock, “A Theory of Resonance,” 1066.<o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn14"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_ednref14" name="_edn14" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[xiv]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> Berssenbrugge, “Daughter,” p. 78 Part 2, 2<sup>nd</sup> complete stanza.<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn15"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_ednref15" name="_edn15" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[xv]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> See Jean-Luc Nancy, “A Faith That Is Nothing At All,” in <i>Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity</i></span><span style="font-size:10;">, 73.<o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn16"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_ednref16" name="_edn16" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[xvi]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> Heidegger, <i>Being and Time</i></span><span style="font-size:10;">, 115.<o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn17"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_ednref17" name="_edn17" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[xvii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> In one of the later Harry Potter novels (and I will remain vague here for those who have ‘spoiler’ concerns), Prof. Dumbledore says to Harry, who is concerned about the status of their current conversation within the poles of dream and reality, “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” J.K. Rowling, <i>Harry Potter and XXXXXX</i></span><span style="font-size:10;"> (New York: Scholastic, 2007).<o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn18"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_ednref18" name="_edn18" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[xviii]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> Dimock, <i>Through Other Continents</i></span><span style="font-size:10;">, 77.<o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn19"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_ednref19" name="_edn19" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[xix]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> Nicola Masciandaro, “Becoming Spice: Commentary as Geophilosophy,” given at CUNY Graduate Center, <i>Glossing is Glorious: The Past, Present, and Future of Commentary</i></span><span style="font-size:10;">, April 9, 2009.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn20"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/commentary%20as%20being%20together%20paper.htm#_ednref20" name="_edn20" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[xx]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> Giambatissta Vico, <i>The New Science of Giambattista Vico</i></span><span style="font-size:10;">, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1968), Book 1, LXV, p. 240.</span></p> </div>dan remeinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330573992530221819.post-65193018241765341302009-05-02T17:11:00.002-04:002009-05-02T17:21:49.218-04:00excerpting from the corpse...<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">An excerpt from the middle-end of a seminar paper called "Knowledge, Sense, and Security: A Treatise with Reference to Walter Benjamin and Julian of Norwich," for a now-complete course called 'Security Issues":</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">....<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">For, the vision is of the head of a dying or dead Christ, an image not alien to Benjamin’s <i>Trauerspiel </i><span style="font-style: normal;">book.<span style=""> </span>The passage is so astonishing that I will quote it here at length:<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>And in alle that time that he shewd this that I have now saide in gostley sight [of the Virgin], I saw the bodley sight lasting of the plenteous bleding of the hede [of Christ].<span style=""> </span>The gret droppes of blode felle downe under the garlonde like pelottes, seming as it has comen oute of the veines.<span style=""> </span>And in the coming oute they were browne rede, for the blode was full thicke.<span style=""> </span>And in the spreding abrode they were bright rede.<span style=""> </span>And whan it came at the browes, ther they vanished.<span style=""> </span>And notwithstonding the bleding continued tille many thinges were sensed and understonded, nevertheles the fairhede and the livelyhede continued in the same bewty and livelines.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in; line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>The plentoushede is like to the droppes of water that falle of the evesing of an house after a grete shower of raine, that falle so thicke that no man may nomber them with no bodely wit.<span style=""> </span>And for the roundhede, they were like to the scale of hering, in the spreding of the forhede.<span style=""> </span>Thes thre thinges came to my minde in the time: pelletes, for the roundhede in the coming oute of the blode; the scale of a herring, for the roundhede in the spreding; the droppes of the evesing of a house, for the plentoushede unnumberable.<span style=""> </span>This shewing was quick and lively, hidous and dredful, and swete and lovely.<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/julian%20corpse%20blog%20excerpt.htm#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">The head is continually bleeding, as if an infinite source of sensual sorrow and dying/decay, but with the constant and incessant mechanisms of life still at work. This is the combination of bleeding (as an operation of a body that is dying by bleeding out or by having been tortured with the ‘crown of thorns’ but also as the operation of a healthy living body when cut or even, in medieval medicine, bled for medicinal reasons) with the assertion that what is shown to bleed is, while <i>hidous</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> also </span><i>lovely</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> and in fact, with a certain “fairhede and livelyhede” in “the same bewty and livelines.” Thus the head itself and its gloss give way to a lively and bustling production clarification of colors and their location in the image which in turn gives way to a description of movements and shapes by means of strange similes—some very oddly specific (the herring) and others quite vague. That the vision in this image is </span><i>only</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of the head is even more astonishing, as if presenting another impossibility in the Head of Christ severed (even if only for the sake of or in the representation of the vision) from the body: the decapitated God.<span style=""> </span>The vision actually could have potentially contained within it the same problem Benjamin sees facing the writers of the </span><i>Trauerspiel</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, that of a world where certain religious mechanisms remain, but the sense has been evacuated.<span style=""> </span>That this could have been a problem for medieval writers, in advance of the Protestant removal of religious sense from profane life, is perhaps an emendation to be made to Benjamin’s historiography.<span style=""> </span>What is important is that this play of representations, the simultaneity of death constantly refreshing itself in the vanishing blood within the mechanisms of life and dying (bleeding) becomes the absolute source for the productions of sense in Julian’s poetics, gives way to a whole flurry of similes concerning the sensual qualities of the dying Christ-head which are then re-iterated in terms of both the fact of their occurrence as simile and their sensual relation to things of this world.<span style=""> </span>Julian, structurally, thus understands in advance what Benjamin claims for the poetics of the </span><i>Trauerspiel</i><span style="font-style: normal;">: <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in; line-height: 200%;">And if it is in death that the spirit becomes free, in the manner of spirits, it is not until then that the body too comes properly into its own.<span style=""> </span>For this much is self-evident: the allegorization of the physis can only be carried through in all its vigour in respect of the corpse...Seen from the point of view of death, the product of the corpse is life.<span style=""> </span>It is not only in the loss of limbs, not only in the changes of the aging body, but in all the processes of elimination and purification that everything corpse-like falls away from the body piece by piece.<span style=""> </span>It is no accident that precisely nails and hair, which are cut away as dead matter from the living body, continue to grow on the corpse.<span style=""> </span>There is in the physis, in the memory itself, a <i>memento mori</i><span style="font-style: normal;">; the obsession of the men of the middle ages and the baroque with death would be quite unthinkable if it were only a question of reflection about the end of their lives.<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/julian%20corpse%20blog%20excerpt.htm#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">Benjmain even cites Lohensteins’s work “celebrating ‘the passion of Christ in alternate Latin and German poems, arranges like the limbs of the human body.’”<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/julian%20corpse%20blog%20excerpt.htm#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[3]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span>What is important to notice about this is the view of the corpse from the point of view of death, but for the sake of life, and the production of writing (be it critical or literary) and its sense in relation not just to the sensuality of the body, but to the figure of the body at its most secure and insecure—the dead body (sure it is dead, yet being dead, entirely vulnerable).<span style=""> </span>Christ’s head, without his body, provides a most compelling example of this phenomenon, still sensing, seemingly forever producing sense extending out from the profane things of Julian’s own world. And the relation of Julian’s writing to the impossible (decapitated for the sake of the vision) head of Christ is one of sense-production, bound up in the manifestation of this kind of sureness not related to the sureness of gnostic knowledge for salvation from this world. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span>Julian pulls off an extraordinary trick in the order of sense available to her late-medieval female position, fully embodying this very logic of the corpse not only in her writing, but in an effort which effectively returned <i>sense</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> to the order of </span><i>this world</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> for her.<span style=""> </span>The certainty that her writing manifests is written already in, on, and around, the sensations of Julian’s own late-medieval female body, and specifically her own death experienced as her life as an anchoress.<span style=""> </span>That is, we speak not only of writing and sense related to the figure of a corpse, but also the writing of Julian’s own corpse.<span style=""> </span>That becoming an Anchoress meant undergoing a ritual of last rights and enclosure into the anchorhold (as a tomb) as a gesture of being dead to the world is a commonplace of scholarship on late medieval piety.<a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/julian%20corpse%20blog%20excerpt.htm#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[4]<!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span>Underscored by Julian’s own near-death experience which accompanies her vision, we cannot but wonder to what extent this ritual actually freed Julian to determine the course of her writing—to what extent being dead-in-life exempted her experience of this world from the compulsion to produce knowledge for the sake of salvation in the other world of resurrection. She writes that we are to be </span><i>seker</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (against the dominant usage of the term as </span><i>knowledge/safety-from</i><span style="font-style: normal;">-</span><i>damnation</i><span style="font-style: normal;">) not to produce security but by taking the security of sense in writing for granted and thus paradoxically writing from the security of the corpse. By becoming dead, and becoming a corpse—by asserting the security of her body as dead—she locates the security of her writing’s ability to relate to the order of sense in this world.<span style=""> </span>Julian locates the security of sense in this world in the writing of the corpse.<span style=""> </span></span></p> <!--[if gte vml 1]><v:line id="_x0000_s1026" style="'position:absolute;z-index:1'" from="-4.95pt,-77.8pt" to="40.05pt,-68.8pt"><v:line id="_x0000_s1027" style="'position:absolute;flip:x;z-index:2'" from="-4.95pt,-77.8pt" to="40.05pt,-68.8pt"><![endif]--><!--[if !vml]--><span style="position: relative; z-index: 0;"><span style="position: absolute; left: -6px; top: -79px; width: 48px; height: 12px;"><img src="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/julian%20corpse%20blog%20excerpt_files/image001.png" shapes="_x0000_s1026 _x0000_s1027" height="12" width="48" /></span></span><!--[endif]--><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/julian%20corpse%20blog%20excerpt.htm#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="">[1]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt;"> ibid., 7:9-24.<span style=""> </span>To clarify: the passage is explaining that Julian saw the bleeding head <i>also</i></span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">, during the entire time that she experienced her ghostly vision of the Virgin.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span> <div style="" id="ftn2"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/julian%20corpse%20blog%20excerpt.htm#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt;"> Benjamin, <i>Origin of German Tragic Drama</i></span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">, 217-218.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn3"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/julian%20corpse%20blog%20excerpt.htm#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[3]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt;"> ibid., 218.<o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn4"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/julian%20corpse%20blog%20excerpt.htm#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[4]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt;"> See Christopher Cannon, “Enclosure,” in <i>The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing</i></span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">, ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace<i> </i></span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 109-113.</span></p></div>dan remeinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330573992530221819.post-72383475980956836132009-04-28T00:10:00.003-04:002009-04-28T00:28:41.291-04:00soon, folks, soon--and some thoughts on collaborationHave I been not posting for a month? Sure.<br /><br />Things have been frighteningly busy, with academic and extra-academic deadlines. But, out of this, I can promise you my paper from the <span style="font-style: italic;">Glossator</span> conference on which I posted previously, comments in anticipation of Kalamazoo (as soon as I get a particular paper written about Julian of Norwich and her relation to the concept of the literary by way of comparing Margery Kempe and Denise Levertov, for one Carolyn Dinshaw).<br /><br />I have been working on an update for the Romance I sometimes write on put up here.<br /><br />Also, I am happy to say that as of today there exists a rough document that my co-conspirator Anna Klosowska and I are at least currently willing to call something that we wrote together for an upcoming BABEL volume (I've posted on this as well, below, about Chrétien and Samuel Beckett). Actually, collaborating with Anna is fantastic. Its actually festive, like, as in, entirely rigorous and intellectual, engaged and repsonsible, and yet somehow wild and even hallucinogenic at times. In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I've been under the sway of Amy Hollywood's writing on Bataille in her <span style="font-style: italic;">Sensible Ecstasy </span>lately--so perhaps I'm just inclined to interpret my own scholarly endeavors with more radical and subject-shattering jouissance than one should (?). And I certainly do not mean to claim collaboration as a kind of mystic practice in a rank and file reading of Hollywood (though, if I was going to assent to a reading of theorizing as secular mysticism, she'd be the one to go to...). Nonetheless, it is possible in collaborating that every little bit you write on, each sentence or thought sent back and forth, might suddenly pop up as at once seemingly out of one's own mind as well as entirely out of that which is not the mind--making you satisfied that you are not in fact everything--and on the condition of that satisfaction, also demanding one partake of that sneaking suspicioun that there is just (in Leo Bersani's words) this All-ness. And yet, all you are doing at that point is doing a reading, sending it to a friend, and expecting a reading in return and vis-versa: for literary critics, just doing our jobs. I really like what we have written, and will perhaps put up a sneak preview of a bit of it soon.dan remeinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330573992530221819.post-5829153873389819532009-03-16T19:45:00.004-04:002009-03-16T20:12:27.966-04:00Exile, Old English, ASSC<div class="Section1"> <p class="MsoNormal">Here is my paper from the ASSC graduate conference, last month. I was privileged to this give on a panel with Mary Kate Hurley and Mo Pareles. The paper was given with <a href="http://sites.google.com/site/dumpspot1/Home/christandsatanhandout.pdf">this handout</a> which contains images I reference near the end of the paper. <br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b><br /></b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b>Where Wisps of Being Mingle: </b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b>Theorizing The Space of the <i>Wræclast</i></b><span style="font-style: normal;"><b> in Christ and Satan</b></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> I want to first invoke Joyce Hill’s call, now almost some 20 years in the past, to attend to the divergent ‘Germania’ and ‘Latinia’ approaches to the so-called Old English ‘biblical poems’ (an article now anthologized in R.M. Liuzza’s Junius 11 Casebook). Yet I would direct us not to Hill’s call for a sober empirical attempt to correct our biases in approaching ‘evidence,’ but to the theoretical implications which appear in “the coming together of Germanic and Latin (Christian) cultures in medieval northwest Europe.”<a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[i]</span></a> Hill analyzed “the two extreme positions from which scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have approached the vernacular poetry of Anglo-Saxon England.”<a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_edn2" name="_ednref2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[ii]</span></a> From out the earliest Germanic philology and antiquitarianism, feeding into a now infamous nationalism (that understandably continues to darken the sound of ‘philology’ in some quarters), the ‘Germania’ approach allowed that these poems “could be dismissed, as they frequently were, as at best dull paraphrases, deserving of comment only for a few passages, which critic after critic cites as evidence of a persistent Germanic spirit surfacing in the Christian subject matter.”<a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_edn3" name="_ednref3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[iii]</span></a> Twenty years ago Hill could claim that “the biblical poems are obviously catching up,” but only at the cost being read almost solely in terms patristic traditions and Latin Christianity.<a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_edn4" name="_ednref4" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[iv]</span></a> I want to offer a reading of the Junius 11 Book poem <i>Christ and Satan</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> geared towards the political work of the poem—analyzing the production of a </span><i>space</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> that is political, or, rather, determinative of the political, operating a space at the historical, theoretical and literary confluence of Germania and Latinia.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> I begin with this lengthy detour because I believe that reading Old English as a confrontation of Germania and Latinia forms the site of a particularly important crux of the west itself: a privileged site for deciphering the space of exile. The space of exile as such open a aporia deep within the ‘west’ and certain impending political disasters around the world. I refer to Giorgio Agamben’s now famous claim that the structure of sovereignty as a double exclusion resides in a figure taken from the Latin tradition and Etruscan law, the <i>homo sacer</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. Yet, Agamben’s analysis of the structure of this relation to the </span><i>one who is exiled</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> will rely on a term whose </span><i>Germanic</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> linguistic origin Agamben sees fit to note (it is of such importance that I ask forgiveness for a long quotation):</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in; line-height: 200%;">If the exception is the structure of sovereignty, then sovereignty is not an exclusively political concept, an exclusively juridical category, a power external to law, or the supreme rule of the juridical order: it is the originary structure in which law refers to life and includes itself in it by suspending it. Taking up Jean-Luc Nancy’s suggestion, we shall give the name <i>ban</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (taken from the old Germanic term that designates both exclusion from the community and the command and insignia of the sovereign) to this potentiality...of the law to maintain itself in its own privation, to apply in no longer applying...He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it, but rather </span><i>abandoned</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable.<a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_edn5" name="_ednref5" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[v]</span></a> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">Now, Agamben insists that while we might view the task of sovereignty as an ‘ordering of space,’ the space of the exception remains prior to this ordering and always at the threshold of what constitutes an outside: “the state of exception opens the space in which the determination of a certain juridical order and a particular territory first becomes possible. As such, the state of exception itself is thus essentially unlocalizable (even if definite spatiotemporal limits can be assigned to it from time to time).”<a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_edn6" name="_ednref6" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[vi]</span></a> But even if this space is permanently un-localizable, or perhaps more importantly if it is, we have yet to decipher the structure of this space as such. So, what is the space of exile, and how is it structured? Given how much we mention <i>exile</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> as readers of Old English—in this corpus of literature that is at once on the edge of and in deeply within the west (geographically and temporally), it seems more than fitting to turn to </span><i>Christ and Satan</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> The Old English word <i>wræclast</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, a masculine noun glossed by Bosworth-Toller as “an exile track,”<a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_edn7" name="_ednref7" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[vii]</span></a> despite being most easily associated with the Exeter Book elegies, occurs three times in the Old English poem </span><i>Christ and Satan</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> in the eleventh-century Manuscript Junius 11</span><i>, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">making </span><i>Christ and Satan </i><span style="font-style: normal;">the poem with the most occurrences of the word in a single poem of the extant corpus. Junius 11, of course, also contains </span><i>Genesis A </i><span style="font-style: normal;">and </span><i>B</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, </span><i>Exodus</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, and </span><i>Daniel</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, in that order. </span><i>Christ and Satan</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is placed at the end of the manuscript and was added later, in multiple, different hands from the first three sections, almost tacked on to remaining folios of what began as a more majestic production, on the outskirts of the book itself in time and space.<a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_edn8" name="_ednref8" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[viii]</span></a> I am concerned here with the structure of the space named by </span><i>wræclast</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, a word most often associated with the socially or politically defined spaces of exile in the Exeter Book, but which occurs in its highest density in </span><i>Christ and Satan</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> In the Exeter Book elegy known as “The Wanderer,”<i> wræclast </i><span style="font-style: normal;">names a space one must </span><i>wadan</i><a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_edn9" name="_ednref9" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[ix]</span></a> (go through, wade through), and also a track or space that commands the complete attention of one’s being, as “warað hine wræclast” (the exile’s path holds him/awaits him/keeps him).<a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_edn10" name="_ednref10" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[x]</span></a> Similarly, the speaker in the Exeter Book poem we call “The Seafarer” provides a self-description as an exile among “þe þa wræclastas widost lecgað” (those who follow the <i>exile’s paths</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> the farthest [out]).<a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_edn11" name="_ednref11" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xi]</span></a> In </span><i>Beowulf</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> , we read that Grendel “wræclastas træd,” (tread on, trampled on the </span><i>wræclast</i><span style="font-style: normal;">),<a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_edn12" name="_ednref12" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xii]</span></a> suggesting that the clearly less- if not entirely non-human can move through this space.<a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_edn13" name="_ednref13" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xiii]</span></a> In a more clearly political context, the Old English </span><i>Death of King Edward</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, describes how the king, following the defeat of Æthelred by Cnut, “<span style="color:black;">wunode wræclastum wide geond eorðan”<a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_edn14" name="_ednref14" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xiv]</span></a> (dwelled in the exile’s paths widely through the earth).</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> What is common to all of these uses of the word is the suggestion that the <i>wræclastas</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is a space, be it landscape or seascape, to where one is cast </span><i>out</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> from a community and it’s safety, where one is </span><i>alone</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, and </span><i>through or around which</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> one constantly </span><i>moves</i><span style="font-style: normal;">—exposed as lonely and without shelter in a vast space. In the above examples, the space is wide, is described as having space enough to wander, dwell, follow, etc. It is indeed Agamben’s threshold where life and law become indistinguishable: the wanderer bereft of any social space for whom any politics would consist in survival; the seafaring pilgrim who, ironically nihilistically, renounces this world as the space of his proper being; the outlawed sovereign king; the monster. Their space is structured in a way such that it both allows and demands movement—the term paired with a verb connoting a sense of travel, wandering, and specifically wandering through a large lonely space. The word thus seems to retain a strong trace of the second part of its compound structure: </span><i>last </i><span style="font-style: normal;">(</span><i>es</i><span style="font-style: normal;">), a noun meaning “a step, footstep, sole of the foot, track, trace.”<a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_edn15" name="_ednref15" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xv]</span></a> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Satan then, in relation to the sovereign God by placement in lawless space, by the ban of God, would seem to occupy a quintessentially exilic space. And one might initially account for the occurrence of <i>wræclast</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> in </span><i>Christ and Satan</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> as an appropriation of the mode of the soliloquizing complaint employed by the poets of the Exeter Book elegies, as Robert Hasenfratz has also observed.<a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_edn16" name="_ednref16" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xvi]</span></a> The whole first section of the poem is of course filled with the complaints of Satan and the fallen angels whose cunning and sense of being wronged might even rival that of Milton’s Satan. The first appearance of the word is in one these complaints by Satan, very much in the mode of an elegy. He says that he must: “hweofran ðy widor,/ wadan </span><i>wræclastas</i><span style="font-style: normal;">” (roam/turn about widely,/ travel the exile-path).<a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_edn17" name="_ednref17" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xvii]</span></a> Satan’s verb-phrase emphasizing strenuous travel and space is perhaps underscored by the common but still strange plural appearing </span><i>wræclastas</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, as if the space is not continuous, but a whole mess of paths. By saying </span><i>wadan wræclastas</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, Satan attempts to frame his speech-act to register as that of a lonely and widely wandering exile, demanding the more sympathetic affection we are more willing to lend to the </span><i>Wanderer</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. Yet, 20 lines before this initial use of this term, Satan first laments fixity as part and parcel of how his place of torment is structured: “þis is ðeostræ ham, ðearle gebunden/ fæstum fyrclommum; flor is on welme/ attre onlæd” (This dark home is tightly bound/ with fast fire-bindings, the floor is of flame/ kindled with venom).<a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_edn18" name="_ednref18" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xviii]</span></a> Satan cannot in fact wander through the space he names as </span><i>wræclast </i><span style="font-style: normal;">even if he wants to in order to hide from the shame of his sin—as the hall is, to him, relatively narrow. Satan claims “Ic eom limwæstmum þæt ic gelutian ne mæg/ on þyssum sidan sele, synnum forwundoed” (I am of such a size that I may not hide/ in this wide hall, totally wounded/stained by sin)<a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_edn19" name="_ednref19" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xix]</span></a> The second time the word appears, Satan is obliged to say that he dwells there in a way characterized by fixity: he explains that “ic geþohte adrifan | drihten of selde,/ weoroda waldend;| sceal nu wreclastas/ settan sorhgcearig, | siðas wide” (I designed to drive the Lord from the throne/the hosts of Ruler; I must now anxious-sorrowing, </span><i>settan</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> the exile’s paths, the wide ways)<a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_edn20" name="_ednref20" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xx]</span></a>. Satan must “settan,” which </span><i>can</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> mean “to dwell,” but also, dwelling with the sense of fixity, as in “to establish” or “to set up.”<a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_edn21" name="_ednref21" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xxi]</span></a> These statements are marked strongly by the first person pronoun, as trustworthy or untrustworthy testimony about the very being of Satan, which in turn reflects something about the space he is in. So the </span><i>wræclast</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> names the space in which Satan dwells, (at least as Satan names it) but unlike in any of the Exeter Book occurrences, Satan describes this space as a structure that can be established in fixity. Remember, he has described it as a kind of shelter, or </span><i>sele</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (hall)—implying that the structure of the place </span><i>wræclast</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> names might be thought otherwise—to the extent that the </span><i>wræclast</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> could consist of a static ‘home,” with a “floor,” even if this floor is constructed of flame and torment. How is it that Satan is </span><i>exposed</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, to what is his being exposed in the sense belonging to the exile under the ban of the sovereign (God), if he is in a narrow shelter (relative to his large size) and not a wide sea or fen?</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Satan’s being is <i>exposed to the other beings</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> in this narrow fixed space, and to the subsequent painful dimming of the boundaries of his being as it mingles with that of the others and the structure of the space itself. For, the third occurrence of </span><i>wræclast</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> reminds us that the fallen angels also dwell in this place, as is it is in their speech that they explain “þæt wræclastas wunian moton” (We should dwell in the exilic space).<a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_edn22" name="_ednref22" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xxii]</span></a> That the demons speak at all in the poem reminds the reader that Satan’s speeches and uses of </span><i>wræclast</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> are in dialogic relation to those of the fallen angels, as the fallen angels use this word in a speech dialoging with those of Satan. These fallen angels dwell there, like Satan, because, as they say, “we woldon swa/ drihten adrifan of þam deoran ham”<a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_edn23" name="_ednref23" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xxiii]</span></a> (they would have driven the Lord out from that precious home)—they would have exiled God. This occurrence of </span><i>wræclast</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> in a dialogue, naming the space in which that very dialogue occurs, suggests that the space is structured in a much less ‘lonely’ way than habitually thought. Perhaps Satan and his demons intentionally ‘misuse’ the term, trying to garner sympathy as if in they were in the plight of the lonely wronged exile and not would-be cosmic Sygbryt’s (who the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that Cynwulf drove out of his lands for unjust deeds). But the sheer density of the term’s occurrence in </span><i>Christ and Satan</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> seems to me to suggest that a reader would have been expected to have the capacity to understand the term in this context, even if ironically. So it is worth asking what the term would mean in this case, even if Satan and the fallen Angels invoke it infelicitously, without the proper political authority, or with intent to deceive. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> This relationship between the multiple beings inhabiting this particular space and the structure of the space itself would then call for further re-thinking of exilic space in terms of how the space structures the relations of these beings to each other. In <i>Christ and Satan</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, this indistinction between inside and outside (identified by Agamben as the </span><i>topos</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of the ban) seems to extend itself to the difference between a space and beings that inhabit it.<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"> <a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_edn24" name="_ednref24" title="">[xxiv]</a></span> The fallen angels who themselves occupy the </span><i>space </i><span style="font-style: normal;">also constitute it as a world for Satan. Satan himself identifies part of the place’s torment for him in complaining that “hwilum ic gehere hellescealas,/ gnornende cynn”<a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_edn25" name="_ednref25" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xxv]</span></a> (Sometimes I hear hell-servants,/ a mourning kin). In this </span><i>wræclast</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, some beings are fixed in space, but the distinction between what constitutes the place/space, and what inhabits it is confused or diffused. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><i> </i><span style="font-style: normal;">So, the </span><i>wræclast</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, as a place of exile, or exile-as-punishment for outlawry, may generally name a space understood less as one through which one can or must move, so much as a space in which an unclear relationship between space and beings, and beings and beings, is recognized as part of the structure of what </span><i>wræclast</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> itself names. In </span><i>Christ and Satan</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, instead of a place to freely and widely wander in a romanticized conception of exilic space,</span><i> </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Satan uses the term for a space of torment recognized more by its relation to torment and punishment, its relation to how relations function inside this space, and how the relation between space/landscape and Beings dissolves. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Agamben invokes his <i>homo sacer</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> as </span><i>bare life</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, a category to which we might assign a wispy sort of ontology, a kind of being in relation to juridical structures only in its non-relation and whose </span><i>being</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> if it indeed has </span><i>being</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> in a rigorous sense—this being has at best a dim sort of ontological status. But the exiles of the </span><i>wræclast</i><span style="font-style: normal;">—as it appears most densely in this early Germanic language text that is nonetheless the confrontation of that Germania with the theology of Latnia—the being of these exiles is even less than wispy. These beings are themselves part of the structure of the space that defines their being, their cries flitting painfully into and out of one another. The space is as much constituted by static wisps of beings whose boundaries between each other are thin and overlapping as it is by </span><i>place</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> As such, <i>wræclast</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> names a space whose structure in relation to the Beings that inhabit it must be thought in itself as a primordial ground for thinking categories of ‘life,’ and ‘the political.’ The trick, with </span><i>Christ and Satan</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, is to think the word in this manner when reading an ostensibly theological poem. The difficulty of understanding this term perhaps reveals the urgent importance of the politics and theology enunciated by the confluence of Germania-Latina in Old English poetry. The exile, the transient of the west, is today increasingly defined in some cases not by </span><i>movement</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> and migration, but by being inscribed in a lack of freedom of movement, identified with the condition of the place itself: I cite the atrocious restriction of movement by the Israeli army during the current/recent war in Gaza, or the debacle of GTMO. To illustrate this crux of the west, unconcealed from within a strange Old English poem, I would even risk rather recklessly appropriating as images commensurate with that of the space of exile in </span><i>Christ and Satan,</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> these images from Alfonso Cuarón’s </span><i>Children of Men</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, of paperless people in cages at the train station, whose structure of exile is made of each other, and whose status, fixed in place in their tiny </span><i>wræclast </i><span style="font-style: normal;">among the other exiles leaves them barely encounterable to the hero of the film, much less the viewer for whom they structure only a ‘background’ image. So how do we relate to, or speak of, this space of exile, if its inhabitants so mingle, if they are under a ban which, in Agamben’s words, demands of us that we “put the very form of relation into question and to ask if the political fact is not perhaps thinkable beyond relation...”<a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_edn26" name="_ednref26" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xxvi]</span></a> These questions arise, after all, from the complaints of a Satan whose use of the word </span><i>wræclast</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> we, on the one hand, should simply </span><i>not believe</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> as a felicitous use of the term. He may, after all, be trying to frame himself as inhabiting the space of exile to garner sympathy. But, if hell, if the exiled being, is simply inaccessible to our critical thought, presenting us with the threat to the western conception of ‘relation’ itself in the play of presence and absence, accessibility and inaccessibility, then who is it that will name the space of exile and her relation to it? Satan’s crafty complaint at once reveals that exilic space is better understood by the ontological status of its inhabitants than by its shape and size (as an Old English Satan struggles against his own language, revealing the limitations of the suffix </span><i>last</i><span style="font-style: normal;">); but reveals also that insincere naming—naming a space with a name that the named space exceeds negatively, speaking about a space or territory without the political authority to do so—is the only speaking that can actually identify exile properly. If it is this convoluted concept of relations to language that we need in order to read the space of exile in Old English poetry, or in any text for that matter, then philology—a discipline trained to read agreements, kinships, influences, rhetoric, etc.—has, at the moment, a pressing task—deciphering perhaps not representations of space and individuals, but the (actual, not the mimetic) relation between the two itself in the realm of the political.</span></p></div><div><br /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%"> <div id="edn1"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_ednref1" name="_edn1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;">[i]</span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> See Joyce Hill, “Confronting <i>Germania Latina</i></span><span style="font-size:10;">: Changing Responses to Old English Biblical Verse” in <i>The Poems of Junius 11: Basic readings</i></span><span style="font-size:10;">, Edited by R. M. Liuzza (London: Routeledge, 2002) pp. 1-19.</span></p> </div> <div id="edn2"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_ednref2" name="_edn2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;">[ii]</span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> Joyce Hill, 1.</span></p> </div> <div id="edn3"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_ednref3" name="_edn3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;">[iii]</span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> ibid., 5.</span></p> </div> <div id="edn4"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_ednref4" name="_edn4" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;">[iv]</span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> ibid., 6.</span></p> </div> <div id="edn5"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_ednref5" name="_edn5" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;">[v]</span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> Giorgio Agamben, <i>Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life</i></span><span style="font-size:10;">, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 28. </span></p> </div> <div id="edn6"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_ednref6" name="_edn6" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;">[vi]</span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> ibid., 19.</span></p> </div> <div id="edn7"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_ednref7" name="_edn7" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;">[vii]</span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> Bosworth and Toller, <i>An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary</i></span><span style="font-size:10;"> (hereafter as Bosworth-Toller), s.v. “wræclast.”</span></p> </div> <div id="edn8"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_ednref8" name="_edn8" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;">[viii]</span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> George Philip Krapp, Introduction, <i>The Junius Manuscript</i></span><span style="font-size:10;">, ASPR 1(New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), p. xii. </span></p> </div> <div id="edn9"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_ednref9" name="_edn9" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;">[ix]</span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> <i>The Wanderer</i></span><span style="font-size:10;">, in <i>The Exeter Book, </i></span><span style="font-size:10;">ASPR 3, Edited by Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie and George Philip Krapp (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), 1. </span></p> </div> <div id="edn10"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_ednref10" name="_edn10" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;">[x]</span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> ibid., 32.</span></p> </div> <div id="edn11"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_ednref11" name="_edn11" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;">[xi]</span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> <i>The Seafarer</i></span><span style="font-size:10;">, in <i>The Exeter Book</i></span><span style="font-size:10;">, 55.</span></p> </div> <div id="edn12"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_ednref12" name="_edn12" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;">[xii]</span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> <i>Beowulf</i></span><span style="font-size:10;">, in <i>Beowulf </i></span><span style="font-size:10;">and <i>The Fight at Finnsburgh </i></span><span style="font-size:10;">3<sup>rd</sup> Ed<i>.</i></span><span style="font-size:10;">, Edited by Fr. Klaeber (Boston: D.C. and Heath, 1950), 1352.</span></p> </div> <div id="edn13"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_ednref13" name="_edn13" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;">[xiii]</span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> This would of course not surprise a reader of Boethius, who comments on the criminal, a status which often is the cause of the exile’s state (though notably not with the wanderer), that “So what happens is that when a man abandons goodness and ceases to be human, being unable to rise to a divine condition, he sinks to the level of being and animal,” from <i>The Consolation of Philosophy</i></span><span style="font-size:10;">, Translated by Victor Watts (London: Penguin, 1966, Revised Ed. 1999), 94.</span></p> </div> <div id="edn14"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_ednref14" name="_edn14" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;">[xiv]</span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> <i>The Death of King Edward</i></span><span style="font-size:10;"> in <i>Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems</i></span><span style="font-size:10;">, ASPR 6, Edited by Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (New York: Columbia University Press), 15. </span></p> </div> <div id="edn15"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_ednref15" name="_edn15" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;">[xv]</span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> Bosworth-Toller, s.v. “last.” </span></p> </div> <div id="edn16"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_ednref16" name="_edn16" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;">[xvi]</span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> See Robert Hasenfratz, “The Theme of the ‘Penitent Damned’ and its Relation to <i>Beowulf </i></span><span style="font-size:10;">and <i>Christ and Satan,</i></span><span style="font-size:10;"> <i>Leeds Studies in English</i></span><span style="font-size:10;">, New Series 21 (1990), pp. 45-69, see especially p. 54. Hasenfratz actually attempts to refine and understand sympathetic responses to the Satan of <i>Christ and Satan</i></span><span style="font-size:10;"> like Margaret Bridges who finds, according to Hasenfratz, that Satan “has become the figure of pathos like the exiled Wanderer” (45).</span></p> </div> <div id="edn17"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_ednref17" name="_edn17" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;">[xvii]</span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> <i>Christ and Satan, </i></span><span style="font-size:10;">in <i>The Junius Manuscript, </i></span><span style="font-size:10;">ASPR 1, Edited by George Philip Krapp (New York: Columbia, 1931), 119-120. </span></p> </div> <div id="edn18"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_ednref18" name="_edn18" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;">[xviii]</span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> ibid., 38b-40a. See also 101b-103a: “Hær is nedran swæg,/ wyrmas gewunade. Is ðis wites clom/ feste gebunden” (Here is the sound of snakes, and serpents dwell/ This binding of torment is/ bound fast).</span></p> </div> <div id="edn19"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_ednref19" name="_edn19" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;">[xix]</span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> ibid., 129-130.</span></p> </div> <div id="edn20"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_ednref20" name="_edn20" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;">[xx]</span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> ibid., 187-189.</span></p> </div> <div id="edn21"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_ednref21" name="_edn21" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;">[xxi]</span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> Bosworth-Toller, s.v. “settan.” </span></p> </div> <div id="edn22"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_ednref22" name="_edn22" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;">[xxii]</span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> <i>Christ and Satan, </i></span><span style="font-size:10;">257.</span></p> </div> <div id="edn23"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_ednref23" name="_edn23" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;">[xxiii]</span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> ibid., 254b-255.</span></p> </div> <div id="edn24"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_ednref24" name="_edn24" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;">[xxiv]</span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> Giorgio Agamben, <i>Homo Sacer: Soveriegn Power and Bare Life</i></span><span style="font-size:10;">, Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p.28. </span></p> </div> <div id="edn25"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_ednref25" name="_edn25" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;">[xxv]</span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> <i>Christ and Satan</i></span><span style="font-size:10;">, 132-133b, (Bosworth-Toller does not gloss <i>hellescealc</i></span><span style="font-size:10;">, but does gloss <i>scealc,</i></span><span style="font-size:10;"> first as “servant.”)</span></p> </div> <div id="edn26"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="file:///Users/danielremein/Documents/wreclastas%20paper%20for%20conf.htm#_ednref26" name="_edn26" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;">[xxvi]</span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> Agamben, <i>Homo Sacer</i></span><span style="font-size:10;">, 29.</span></p> </div> </div>dan remeinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330573992530221819.post-65091025168664413952009-03-12T15:20:00.003-04:002009-03-12T15:28:59.177-04:00Queering Philology updateCome one, come all. Some of you who read this blog may have already found this through an link over at In the Middle. But, for everyone, here is, straight from the schedule for Kalamazoo this year, the promised SSHMA panel on queering the practice of philology, complete with location and time. I have already been privileged to see some of Mo Pareles' work related to her paper for this session as the ASSC grad conference just the other week (I'll post my own paper from that soon), and it is downright fantastic. I am happy to see this on the horizon.<br /><br /><br /><b><br />Session #395: Sex, Theory, and Philology: Queering Anglo-Saxon Studies<br /><br />Saturday, May 9th @ 10:00 am [Valley I, 107]<br /><br />Society for the Study of Homosexuality in the Middle Ages (SSHMA), Sponsor<br /><br />Daniel Remein (New York University), Organizer<br /><br />Lisa M.C. Weston (California State University-Fresno), Presider<br /><br /> * Eileen A. Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), "The Light of Her Face was the Voluptuous Index of a Multiplicity of Guthlacs: Desire, Friendship, and Incest in the Lives of Saint Guthlac"<br /><br /> * Mo Pareles (New York University), "The Reflexivity of the Unclaenum Gaste: The West Saxon Gospels and the Vocabulary of Self-Mutilation"<br /><br /> * Daniel Remein, "Eddies of Time, Licks of Language: Wulf and Eadwacer and the Queer Time of Old English Philology"<br /><br /> * Stacy Klein (Rutgers University), RESPONSE<br /><br /></b><br /><br /><i>Sex, Theory, and Philology: Queering Anglo-Saxon Studies</i><br /><br />Taking a hint from Carolyn Dinshaw's claim that an affective historiography could queer historiography itself, as well as the 2008 BABEL session at Kalamazoo titled "Is there a Theory in the House of Old English Studies?," this session especially aims to consider the significance that a Queer history of Anglo-Saxon writing has for contemporary Queer communities. Papers will consider not only a mapping of queer literary history in the Anglo-Saxon period, but also the specific ways that we might queer the very procedures of study for those texts in question. Under examination will be the potential for Queer pleasure in the practice of philology, Queer desire specific to Old English texts, as well as how Queer theory and philology might be better understood as working together—in opposition to traditional views of the opposition of theory and philology. The session will thus provide for possible new discoveries and new directions in the role of Queer theory in Anglo-Saxon studies, while also considering how Anglo-Saxon studies can in turn make theoretical interventions in the contemporary.dan remeinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330573992530221819.post-31357831598224268002009-02-11T14:00:00.003-05:002009-02-11T14:24:55.524-05:00sentences on my verse<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO2z6KHTNkXq9SoV-JGcPx3RfuT0FsdTJnxtYkAkcIA5L5RmQZAgsa-9SjjyLg3_sDGakdbUkAPg_lrqPGJ-gNkfYYj1mdgsxt7lfyrVbLtDUniDuuKH5uPNYvnP8pjEPNq1wAFQ8sNEcQ/s1600-h/Sentence6_cover.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 196px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO2z6KHTNkXq9SoV-JGcPx3RfuT0FsdTJnxtYkAkcIA5L5RmQZAgsa-9SjjyLg3_sDGakdbUkAPg_lrqPGJ-gNkfYYj1mdgsxt7lfyrVbLtDUniDuuKH5uPNYvnP8pjEPNq1wAFQ8sNEcQ/s320/Sentence6_cover.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5301621233760688194" /></a><br /><br />I am quite happy that in the mail yesterday arrived my contributor-copy of the new issue of <a href="http://firewheel-editions.org"><i>Sentence: a journal of prose poetics</i>, No. 6.</a> I am more than pleased to see another volume from <i>Sentence</i>, and especially one in which some of my work gets to hang out with work from poets I admire a great deal: Denise Duhamel, Noah Eli Gordan, Cara Benson (of the Journal <i>Sous Rature,</i> et. al., not to mention some Italian poets of note (see below).<br /><br />If some of you medievalist types aren't up on the recent history of prose poetry in journals, <i>Sentence</i> was started by Brian Clements et. al. (editors include Maxine Chernoff) to pick up the work of the journal <i>The Prose Poem: An International Journal</i> when it went defunct (1992-2000--now being <a href="http://digitalcommons.providence.edu/prosepoem/">archived online</a>). The journal thus takes a certain stance on form about which I want to reserve a great deal of ambivalence'[prose poem' (even though I ostensibly write them) as term: what work does it do and why do we want to do this work? Why not recognize a more ambitious poetics in which prose like that of Derrida might be read as a poem--is this something to do with attempting to achieve status of 'the literary' as that which in the 18th and 19th century emerges as fiction/verse that does not fit into genre-categories?]. But, this ambivalence at least means that whatever they are doing with this journal is something to admire a great deal, if the title alone can do this kind of work. As a title, <i>Sentence</i> is perhaps even more interesting (see my post from a few days ago). I like this journal. <br /><br />Anyways, the book is a handsome volume, with interesting physical features: perfect-bound 5-3/8" X 7-1/4", 299 pages + front and back matter, small but readable point size for the text of the poems (which is a serif font that contrasts in a nice and even sexy sort of way with the large sans-serif titles, numbering, and footers).<br /><br />Each issue of this journal contains a feature, lately focused on the state of the prose poem in languages other than English (in translation, of course). For no. 6, its Italian. The volume contains poems, essays, and "a feature on The Prose Poem in Italy, introduced by Luigi Ballerini and curated by Ballerini with Gian Lombardo. It includes work by Mariano Baino (translated by Lombardo), Maurizio Cucchi (translated by Amy-Louise Pfeffer), Angelo Lumelli (translated by Maria Esposito Frank), Giampiero Neri (translated by Stephen Sartarelli), Tiziano Rossi (translated by Olivia E. Sears), and Leonardo Sinisgalli (translated by Brendan Hennessey."dan remeinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330573992530221819.post-87982670607949425162009-02-09T13:49:00.004-05:002009-02-09T14:33:22.992-05:00Queer News, this: a comment on how history threatens the State<a href="http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/020709/gen_385535247.shtml">http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/020709/gen_385535247.shtml</a><br /><br /><div>Writes Greg Bluestein of the AP: <div> </div><div><blockquote>State Rep. Charlice Byrd, R-Woodstock, took the House well on Friday to announce a "grassroots" effort to oust professors with expertise in subjects like male prostitution, oral sex, and "queer theory."<div> </div><div>"This is not considered higher education," Byrd said</div></blockquote></div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div>And:<blockquote><div><blockquote></blockquote></div><div>"Our Job is to educate people in sciences, business, math," said Hill, a vice chairman the budget-writing House Appropriations Committee. He said professors aren't going to meet those needs "by teaching a class in queer theory."</div><div></div></blockquote><br /><div>Usually, I don't engage with this sort of thing. But I cannot help but point out that the Representative's arguments (which academics and opposing lawmakers retort with arguments that the argument is flawed, or that the university hires professors who investigate 'human experience') totally omit the humanities from what should ostensibly be a university curriculum. Now, you would think that the GOP would want history, so they could teach students about all kinds of great propaganda points in so-called Amerc. history, about the grandeur of Rome as it moved from republic to empire, etc. But no, they simply omit the humanities. Queer theory, which the reporter even must put in brackets, is apparently so toxic to the state that if "History" or "English" or even "Religion" might harbor or shelter this little terrorist, we will have to root them out as well, no matter how conservative these disciplines might be. </div><div><br /></div><div>This brings up something I thought about quite a lot for a good while, in light of the Bersani-style gays should never be good citizens line from <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Homos </span>against the Dinshaw-esque desire to save or produce or claim some kind of positive community. Lately I tend to think these things aren't mutually exclusive for a number of reasons. Derrida's "Pharmakon" essay is famous for reminding us that our task in the humanities, as it regards writing and studying writing, will not make us good citizens. In <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Specters of Marx</span> Derrida reminds us that to listen to ghosts is not to live 'better' but 'more justly,' leading me to believe that living more justly does not always mean being a good citizen. </div><div><br /></div><div>Queer Theory (without the quotes) may yet still have some of its threatening potential some would say passed away sometime in the 90's. Queer Theory may be one of those things that is not better, but more just. Toxic to the state, dead set on bringing down civilization in a kind of Benjaminian anarchic impulse, but opening up community all the while. I applaud the fact that this sort of offense and ignorant legislative attempts are being covered my a journalist. </div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Thanks to Karl Steel for the link to this story. </span></span></span></div></div>dan remeinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330573992530221819.post-79275663537632667102009-02-07T22:55:00.000-05:002009-02-07T22:56:04.727-05:00how the we accrues: a question<blockquote style="font-style: italic;"></blockquote><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><blockquote>What she petitioned for was never<br />instead of something else<br /> --Levertov, "The Showings: Lady Julian of Norwich"</blockquote></span><blockquote style="font-style: italic;font-family:courier new;"><blockquote><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></blockquote></blockquote>Last night was dinner and drinks and desert and drinks:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguMmyLd6w9twObOL5qJJCFDFE-YZ_r978uoNh435bF5S3FGA7h7lB2U2_LUh3gsgE3TcVzcvGYSK9JHkobemxf3iGFInp5STdlZl6YuI1ParBhxPJ3oSOK6pEqKf37iEZgcoOv-uJeNHSj/s1600-h/telebar"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 134px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguMmyLd6w9twObOL5qJJCFDFE-YZ_r978uoNh435bF5S3FGA7h7lB2U2_LUh3gsgE3TcVzcvGYSK9JHkobemxf3iGFInp5STdlZl6YuI1ParBhxPJ3oSOK6pEqKf37iEZgcoOv-uJeNHSj/s200/telebar" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5300260740414300226" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ_-1-baUp_HBYl0l4QPttV075hAuKmSG2iGtOg3z4O9vdzSal4KB6aCYqHzaTYKB44JprWGqMRBCC_XXPl-SavTJK77PKnWwBBZM8u4FM7TbXDzbBzWBc0l2bkwYDyCjUkVuryCbXwEHt/s1600-h/pannaII.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ_-1-baUp_HBYl0l4QPttV075hAuKmSG2iGtOg3z4O9vdzSal4KB6aCYqHzaTYKB44JprWGqMRBCC_XXPl-SavTJK77PKnWwBBZM8u4FM7TbXDzbBzWBc0l2bkwYDyCjUkVuryCbXwEHt/s400/pannaII.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5300260614086612450" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />with some of my most favorite people ever, Eileen Joy, Jeffrey Cohen, Liza Blake, Mary Kate Hurley, <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiUnreO4_fZbckwztqbS8Q4WH34d3YJZHkKVnFo09eDRy4qXm4xTxBheFtDQ6dw3LWYFevoBZYBX6s0Moyu7jbjIjAsXIoM-z-xq-zR1orPvGfTjddT1987U38gLmAqlf50mUEoMl2LXbe/s1600-h/elletaria.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 122px; height: 118px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiUnreO4_fZbckwztqbS8Q4WH34d3YJZHkKVnFo09eDRy4qXm4xTxBheFtDQ6dw3LWYFevoBZYBX6s0Moyu7jbjIjAsXIoM-z-xq-zR1orPvGfTjddT1987U38gLmAqlf50mUEoMl2LXbe/s320/elletaria.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5300260862241200066" border="0" /></a>Meagan Manas, Nicola Masciandaro, Heather Masciandaro, Myra Seaman. Cheap and fantastic indian food (coconut samosa, champagne, beers, <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmgKOjEiWTvebrrkAaUrRG8NZf__PSECX_b4cf8fI5t2uCr9d0xObo6qWIdXIOUbK_XW4_qguQge2_T83kLmievUC6j77GZK_C54eNOwh1TiFk8iZyxP_X7mCCRyBc429uS3hx8N-8N9Be/s1600-h/photo(2).jpg"> strange orange 'custard' with literally no flavor at all</a>), the telephone bar, then closing down the only place around where we could find a quiet table to actually enjoy everyone's company. And, that is exactly what the evening then became about--but of course in a way particular to that variety of citizen we call the academic. That is to say, Jeffrey Cohen started asking serious questions.<br /><br />And, in the way of academics, everyone had something to say or to ask, or both. I am still reveling in the loveliness of the conversation (instead of reading the 'katherine-group' "Life of St. Margaret), and how damn happy I am that such people are out there and that sometimes they gather. One of the upshots of the conversation pertained specifically to the <a href="http://www.siue.edu/babel/Babel-Home.htm"> BABEL</a> working group, and how to keep a community going--how to want to and insist on perpetuating a community--maintaining it across time and into the future while the community remains one because of a strange double belief in the Now and yet the importance of the Past simply for what it was (and yes, I will admit, thanks to MK Hurley that sometimes, sometimes, there is an obligation to undertake the task of 'description' for this very same reason)--maintaining this collective of individuals who are asking constantly what the hell they are doing, together. Particularly, what is ringing in my ears from this conversation is the sense of demanding that we do whatever we do as in and for the world. So the question, in some sense, is how to remain a worldly community. Another thought I had as a result of these conversations that seems to be sticking with me brings out the not-so-closet Derridean in my thought: a tension that arises in such communities between, on one side provisionality and ephemerality, and on the other unconditionality and perpetual memory/absolute hope. One wants everything to be provisional--to be ready to revolutionize at any moment in order to welcome whatever-is-coming in the unbelievable risk of hospitality. One is obliged, even in such provisionality--or with provisionality as one's means, to remain devoted to the un-conditionality of the community, the risk of its openness. Without this, there is no hope of (to be anti-Eleatic) movement, repetition--the movement of the past into the future as the very hope of the new, or the re-newed (I've been reading Kierkegaard--my apologies); no other-as-absolute-other to welcome and make the community worth it (even if it means risking, as Derrida would say, evil). It actually occurs to me then that this is a very old question--at least as old as the 'presocratics': a question of change and movement. The question will called a naive one, but to no avail: I will keep asking it [convinced that--though we may experience it all as just an economy of the Same--we can should and even must hope, must remember and repeat and not just in terms of a recollection of what is know from 'time immemorial.' We cannot learn or form communities of learning around learning when learning means the putting into place of the Same, the recollection of what our 'eternal souls' have known before this incarnation (à la late Socratic dialogues on the eternal nature of the soul). We think we are above this, but whenever our community is about putting the right ideas in the right place, we make a mistake the west has made since the ancients--putting ideas above the world, forgetting the infinite finitude shared by ideas, by communities, just as much as our human selves--or, for that matter, rocks and stones]. We can only form communities as a thing of the world, in the world, for the world, of the material of the world and of learning as a learning which occurs contingently, ephemerally, in the World as an event of the world that also makes the world (where only on that condition (its finitude) does it touch infinity).<br /><br />So, I'll ask the question, obstuse as it is, that I am leading up to as a question for this community: How is change or movement possible?<br /><br />Below then, are a few little notes or sketches, aphoristic and incomplete--things I am by no means devoted to and may not believe, but am experimenting with--emerging around this topic of community. And not just any community--this one, this weird community of medievalists, <a href="http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2009/02/medievalists-trash-washington-square.html">one of whom a few days ago even told a hotel bartender with a straight face that a handful from this community were from the middle ages.</a>. So, these are not even my ideas--not ideas at all. They are of some infinite corner of the world that is emerging between us, dear reader.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">A few notes towards a non-ossifying 'scholarly' community:</span><br /><br />§<br /><br />Unconditional community to shelter provisional work. But two kinds of provisional work: 1. Work which consistently withholds itself, gathering in silence before speech, speech itself. This work is provisional to the extent that it is always--even and most especially in the moments of its speech--enunciated by an elegant uncertainty that it all too often mis-recognizes as timidity. It thinks it withholds speech, in timidity and silence because it can't figure out what it is it wants to say, is too provisional; but in its finest moments such work is not withholding but gathering. This is the sense of the words of Heidegger's "Japanese interlocutor in the 'Dialogue on Language": "<br /><b></b><blockquote><b>J:</b> <i>Koto,</i> the happening of the lightening message of the graciousness that brings forth.<br /><br /><b>I:</b>[Heid.] <i>Koto</i> would be the happening holding sway...<br /><br /><b>J:</b>...holding sway over that which needs the shelter of all that flourishes and flowers.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">I: </span>Then, as the name for language, what does <i>Koto ba</i> say?<br /><br /><b>J:</b> Language, heard through this word, is: the petals that stem from <i>Koto</i>.<br /><br /><b>I:</b> That is a wonderous words, and therefore inexhautstible. (Heidegger, <i> On the Way to Language </i>, 47).</blockquote><br />Even when its speaks, it speaks briefly, clearly, not obnoxiously as if it had earned the right to speak loudly and annoyingly simply by having kept silent. I knows keeping silent is absolutely beyond value, acquires no capital or mandate to be heard once the silence is released as speech that is in turn always provisional. This sort of provisional work, when it speaks, <i>says</i> in such a way that is gathers even in its most timid of sayings, resounding long after--even if in its provisionality it is shortly thereafter retracted. This resounding repeats (not mimicking) as an affective gravitational movement on the level of history which moves forward in time a gathering in the sphere of its hearers, thus a provisionality which in saying is faithful to a community with a kind of unconditional gathering and opening of the community as a saying that is a gathering. This kind of work and its saying is one possible saying then which, in its provisionality, works constantly to forestal the closure of a scholarly community, but without the sort of fear that drives ritual efforts of prevention which, rather than preventing closure and ossification, inevitably grant it a priori, as belonging to their very structure. This is the way of saying that belongs to a particular friend of mine.<br /><br />2. Work which is constantly speaking, making sayings and statements. This works is always provisional, knows itself to be so. It is ready to betray itself and anything its said at any moment, yet performs its statements as if with absolute certainty, as if to anything it must suspend provisionality and pretend, because otherwise it would say nothing. Such work risks closing any community simply by producing a boundary, a line inside which there are those who have the pre-understanding that these statements are performative, that the work knows itself to be provisional even as it speaks with certainty to such an extreme that it could not dream of taking itself so seriously. To open a community it must leave hints about such saying. If it can do this, it can take constant aim at all the urgent and unpredictable crises that threaten to close a community and, turning on a dime, say <i> something</i> about them. Such saying knows that there is infinite meaning, but operates its faith in such possibility by constantly suspending the serious, as if a student of Erasmus' "In Praise of Folly." It in fact changes constantly its work and the basis of the work--but the nature of the work which gathers such constant saying is a work that works in a shelter of silence given cover by the constant saying--could only risk certain questions which are so improbable and naive if it pretends just for a moment that something might happen (something that matters) and that if it can pretend that this question is the World for the moment--because it knows that the World is what matters infinitely, but that certain questions which matter to the world can only be posed if it pretends, in a pose and just for a moment, that that nothing matters or is serious. The trick is for this work to operate in a spirit of generosity and not a gnostic encoding of secret knowledge only for the initiate--for the pose to provoke but not convince--to be always utterly unbelievable. Again, such aversion to the content of a specific belief moves towards a motion of faith, in which the constant enacting of possibilities consists in the repetition of the community as different, moving into a future.<br /><br />§<br /><br />Faith from nothing vs. belief in something. Start with nothing rather than the something, that assumption that something is there. Not anything to come, just what's here. Worldliness, as in, it matters now. There is no other world, or there is another world, this one. Faith in the movements of so many individual wills that move diversely together in one place that is disseminated, occasionally gathered. This rather than gathering around a belief. Allow the gathering, the being-part-of the gathering as a repetition of the infinite meaning of This World. Absolutely no divinity in this world or any other as the condition of such gathering as the event one might once have called divinity, as the repetition of the infinite meaning of this world. Gathering by and around nothing except the infinite becomings that are the gathering.<br /><br />§<br /><br /><br />Against the sentence: against the pronouncement that ends; sober reasoning well-balanced and organized so as to convince--to deceive; progression of subjectification in which its readers and hearers are deceived into thinking that a period celebrates the completion of a metaphysical movement in which language dominates reality; logo constantly beating down world or trapping its subjects within itself so they cannot access world; the pronouncement of a law which coincides of the originary violence of language itself in forcing something into its proper hierarchized place within the regimes of the Same and recollection; punishment of those who cannot or refuse to <i>know</i>; pronouncement of law which coincides with the violence of ideas that control;<br /><br />§<br /><br />Death is always overdetermined. There are always so many reasons for an event of dying. But the dead one itself is the one not that threatens to ossify the community, but whose memory, if lost, can do just this. What can we not imagine?<br /><br />§<br /><br />From Cole Swenson's "The Invention of the Mirror":<blockquote><pre><br /><i>The New World</i><br /><br />Used flint<br /> or an obsidian strain.<br />They had others made of Inca stone<br />said by Illoa to have been<br /><br />blue and crossed by veins<br />that take no polish, that break<br />in sequence or pyrite<br /> or marcasite<br /> sometimes called the stone of health<br />worn in a ring<br />so that with a single downward glance you can be<br />the infinitesimal:<br /> Sing:<br /> <i>if in pieces<br /> we are accurate</i><br />here the <i>we</i> accrues. (37)<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.ohiocitizen.org/campaigns/isg/42625396.ISGApril212005166BW.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 500px; height: 333px;" src="http://www.ohiocitizen.org/campaigns/isg/42625396.ISGApril212005166BW.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /></pre><br /></blockquote>dan remeinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330573992530221819.post-37450089730841887022009-01-13T20:25:00.003-05:002009-01-13T20:33:51.914-05:00whiskey & fox fashion<a href="http://whiskeyandfox.blogspot.com"><i>Whiskey & Fox</i></a> has finally gotten around to putting up an archive of past print-only issues for download, staring with Vol. 2 No. 2, <i>Fashion</i>. <br /><br />Poets in the issue include the Slovenian wonder Tomaž Šalamun, and the late Julie Granum, whose death last year I noted on the blog. <br /><br />Worth a read, I'd say, even if I am an editor. Additionally, the journal is still taking submissions for its next issue <i>Doing Politics With Animals</i>, so if you've got something up your sleeve, make haste...dan remeinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330573992530221819.post-88923263320258563052009-01-10T17:21:00.005-05:002009-01-10T17:33:21.342-05:00glossing is a glorious thing. nyc, spring.The schedule is now up, <a href= "http://ojs.gc.cuny.edu/index.php/glossator/"> here</a>, of a conference I am so so delighted to be a part of this spring; at the CUNY Grad Center, by the Journal <i> Glossator: Practice and Theory of Commentary</i>, under the helm of my friend Nicola Masciandaro (of <i><a href="http://thewhim.blogspot.com">The Whim</a></i> blogging fame. <br /><br />You'll finds favorites of this blog Anna Klosowska, Ryan Dobran, Michael Moore, Erin Labbie, et. al. on the panels. You'll see my little name honored to be chairing the panel on which Klosowka/Labbie sit and on the panel with M. Moore (with another Heidegger paper as well!!), and you'll even see a paper on Auden, which you know (or don't) that I'll be salivating to hear. <br /><br />Additionally, there is a round table with some names of note: (Moderator: Nicola Masciandaro) David Greetham, The Graduate Center, City University of New York; Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University; Avital Ronell, New York University; Jesús Rodríguez Velasco, Columbia University.<br /><br />Be there, or fail to be subject to commentary (?).dan remeinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330573992530221819.post-41840597563345496822008-12-01T23:38:00.002-05:002008-12-01T23:41:44.164-05:00more romance of the borrowed umbrella<span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family:courier new;">§ 3</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:courier new;">The last time Germy had used the phrase, "the truth of the human heart," he had been on an airplane. By the time of our story, when Germy is getting off of the train and heading to Alicia's, no airplane had run for quite a while out of the Pale. Germy had been fingering a gold ring he had found in the airport when he was on the flight. It had been dropped by a man who got on a plane before him. Germy did not know this. He tried in vain to get a flight attendant or airline employee to accept the ring into their lost-and-found coffers. The employees said they could not accept it. The new property-protection laws prohibited it. So Germy took a poll from amongst those present at the airport gate as to what should be done with the ring. He actually formed a small town-hall-meeting style forum, and allowed each traveler to vet her own ideas about what it was that should be done. Germy himself did not participate. He was, for good deal of the episode, voiding his bowels in the airport lavatory. Finally, certain members of the group announced that they felt a consensus had been reached, and it was suggested that those present should vote to ascertain the correspondence of this feeling with the, as it was once said, "situation on the ground." The vote was unanimous that a consensus had indeed been reached and that the sense of said consensus should be understood to mean that Germy should indeed himself take the ring. As it turned out, this particular ring would become rather worthless soon enough. But the ring is just a ruse for you, dear reader. </span><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-family:courier new;">::</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:courier new;">The day that Germy was holding, gingerly, like a little story or a cauliflower given as a love-gift, this ring, he was also feeling a certain anxiety. The man seated next to him on the plane surely recognized him as involved. The man surely worked for the State of New Jersey and surely knew that Germy was traveling with cargo in the form of a coded message. He needed to deliver his message to a friend in Brooklyn, NY by 5 pm only three days hence. This, actually could have put things in a difficult way for Germy as at that particular time the airlines were, for security reasons, routing at least 75% of all flights through a connecting airport not announced to the passengers until landing. Needless to say, this was many months after all windows had been banned, internationally, on all passenger commercial aircraft. As a result, Germy, and his companion, who later would take the name Matt and scurry off of the Pale towards Florida in order to catch a boat to Britain and the hope of a regulated State-Zone, were routed from Cleveland, OH, through Philadelphia (which had been planned and announced) and then back through Memphis, where they were held for 18 hours. </span><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-family:courier new;">It was, moreover, in the wake of this tiresome holdover that Germy's seat had been re-shuffled, he was surely moved on purpose, away from his co-conspirators, with whom the reader has hopefully developed a cursory acquaintance. In this state, Germy took a great deal of solace in this ring. And this ring in fact gave him an incredible idea which he was, indeed, already attempting to make good on by putting the potential plan of great design into motion, against the will and art or this man who would take the name Matt, and his entire cohort. Germy got up and asked for a cup of coffee from the attendant in the back of the aircraft. It was large, a 777, used for flights just like this one, so passengers could never really be sure if a landing would result in allowing some passengers to leave, at a connection or final destination, or if the plane would be held for some unfortunate length of time. </span><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-family:courier new;">Taking a phial from his pocket, Germy slipped not into the lavatory, which would have certainly aroused the suspicions of his Statist seat-mate, but into the little cubby just outside this very room on many of these planes, where a window would have been for Germy's enjoyment only months before. He stood there, phial hidden slyly in hand, sipping his coffee. He put this ring into the coffee, carefully, so the attendant would see him doing it. The attendant spoke harshly and demanded that Germy show him what he put in the cup and why. Germy, told him what it was, a ring, and told him the story of how it came to him on this very trip. He also deflected the demands of the attendant to actually produce the ring long enough for his hand holding the phial to twist out a pea-sized stopper that was blocking a bit of clear fluid. This was not sinful, this was not sin: this is the phrase that ran through Germy's mind, around his heart, and in his very bowels, as he maneuvered his hand holding the phial up and around to pull the ring out of the cup, as the attendant leaned over to verify this passenger's story and strange behavior (which, surely, was odd, suspicious and, probably dangerous and a threat to the ruling American Hope party to which he was exceedingly loyal), and Germy tipped the phial over, emptying its contents into the steaming coffee--the very same which at that moment sheltered an 18k gold ring of substantial weight. At this moment, Germy felt about the ring the way he would feel about the aforementioned borrowed umbrella.</span><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-family:courier new;">This was not sinful, this was not sin: this is the phrase in reference to which Germy would speak of "the truth of the human heart." Germy was recounting this story to Remus when Alicia reminded them that they needed, very badly, to get inside, to safety. </span><br /></span>dan remeinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330573992530221819.post-60447591654541532202008-11-01T17:38:00.002-04:002008-11-01T17:41:30.220-04:00a new book we all should read<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpfzCqAhTHYy20Zb7jFH2sg5IaH6RTFeiZrJ2zOJtVKyZ8hGTdUituZ3iNnIkCNTbX2SX0ZReNZ8F68dxuxHV3Gkh8RS3IsyNqa51RJIcMdTyKZnQ5TPhdpec3ZNC2BB__qh2R_6PPC5bT/s1600-h/417VnibA+QL._SL500_AA240_.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 240px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpfzCqAhTHYy20Zb7jFH2sg5IaH6RTFeiZrJ2zOJtVKyZ8hGTdUituZ3iNnIkCNTbX2SX0ZReNZ8F68dxuxHV3Gkh8RS3IsyNqa51RJIcMdTyKZnQ5TPhdpec3ZNC2BB__qh2R_6PPC5bT/s400/417VnibA+QL._SL500_AA240_.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5263807394467977698" /></a><br />This <a a href = "http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9622099270/ref=s9int_c1_img4-rfc_p-3237_p?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-1&pf_rd_r=19JHCDFET48XGRJDP2BJ&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=371408601&pf_rd_i=507846">book</a> isn't out yet, but I think we all should read it as soon as it is:dan remeinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330573992530221819.post-27096464675640468202008-10-22T21:38:00.006-04:002008-10-22T22:27:23.475-04:00As much as it is now true of many of my friends (without whom I can no longer think or write) that they inhabit cities rather far from my own, and as much as I champion and think and write a good deal about being-together, and thus DO want to be with them, I feel equally as strongly--and often at the very same time--that some of my moments of deepest communing take place in what we conventionally call solitude. This is why, of course, so many of us love reading. This is how C. Dinshaw can claim so many wonderful things touch her in the archive. This is how Cary Howie can think as he does about the present enclosing the past--and it is also how high modernists felt so out of step with time in their own way--along with less conventional (but still) modernists like C.S. Lewis who could do their appreciative criticism of medievals as if in the voice of the book review for something that just came out last week.<br /><br />In this light, 2 poems in my current sphere of reading and thinking.<br /><br />First, a poem from an Alice James Books Jane Kenyon Chapbook (a now unfortunately defunct award) by Alice Jones, called <i>Isthmus</i> (a word which names one of those wonderful middles). A good deal of the book is actually a little too 'nice' or 'tame' for me as a poet--but these lines are a little bit Rilkean and provoke a particular enigma which obsesses me: connection as the registering of a equiprimordiality of Being and Beings with World (Beings as a phenomena of particular densities of World):<br /><br /><br /><i>Going out into the break,<br /> in the thick of atoms--<br /><br />finding what--<br /> your being? Mine?<br /><br />Are we the stuff<br /> or the empty acres<br /><br />in between? I can't place you.<br /> Disarticulated particles<br /><br />we fly and coalesce again beside<br /> each other: one cleft,<br /><br />one entering, the primal<br /> grasp of matter: creatures<br /><br />yoked here, bumped up<br /> breathing, onto the shores<br /><br />of the world's desire to reach itself.<br /><br /><br /></i>And then, a textual moment which haunts me many of those time in which I desire so badly to touch something or someone in the midst of reading, from W.H. Auden's "Journey to Iceland" (did I mention I loved High Modernism?):<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Europe is absent: this is an island and should be<br />a refuge, where the affections of its dead can be bought<br /> by those whose dreams accuse them of being<br /> spitefully alive, and the pale<br /><br />from too much passion of kissing feel pure in its deserts.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span>Fantastic. Touching, or enclosing, or separating, as events of World desiring itself. In our dreams, certain of us scholars accuse the dead of being alive because we want them to be so. And if it 'worked,' these dreams should call the ghosts into haunting us even when this is most impossible--as part of the very isolating structure of the space of 'Island' and 'not-Europe.' I of course believe (at least I think I do--note that I did NOT write 'call them into <i>being</i>' but 'into <i>haunting</i>': an operation which operates on the condition that a thing just quite <i>isn't</i>) that this 'works.'<br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span><i> </i>dan remeinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330573992530221819.post-26240864301371740222008-10-21T11:52:00.004-04:002008-10-21T11:55:34.914-04:00Palimpsestic Poetics in Orfeo: What A Book Might Do to a BodyHere is the text of the paper I gave at the <a href="http://www.siue.edu/babel/SEMA08Panels.htm">Southeastern Medieval Association Conference </a>in a BABEL Working Group sponsored session with co-conspirators Liza Blake, Mary Kate Hurley (of <a href="http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/">ITM </a>), and Blaire Zeiders--just a couple weeks ago. The latest from a project that I previously wrote about here on wraetlic:<br /><br /><a href="http://danremein.googlepages.com/semapaperrecovery.htm">Palimpsestic Poetics in <i>Orfeo</i>: What A Book Might Do to a Body</a>dan remeinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330573992530221819.post-77516823871098475992008-10-14T18:23:00.007-04:002008-10-14T19:30:42.403-04:00why there are not "bokes ynowe": all our little laborers, toiling for revolutionHere's a short meditation of of sorts from my current coursework--specifically a course the '<span style="font-style: italic;">Piers Plowman</span> Tradition," dealing with all the short poems around the big one (the Symonie, Parliament of the Three Ages, etc.), both before and after, but with Langland as the centerpiece. Now, I have some good friends in the discipline of medieval studies who happen to find <span style="font-style: italic;">Piers</span> rather dry at best, and totally unnecessary to study and a little bit just plain boring. I happen to find it....fun. <br /><br />The poem for me is so fun, largely, and most generally, because its structure and poetics seem to elude the workings of literary history which seem to depend so much on economies of representation (think both the history's ability to represent trends and work etc. in literature across time--breaks, shifts, etc., and also the works which form the 'object' of the history's study to need to be themselves little machines of a mimetic economy in order for a mimetic economy to account for them). This allows us to track things like a 'history of representation' across western lit. And this is surely useful and great. I love Auerbach, for instance and I mean that. But, this limits us to writing a history of tropes and trends and leads us into obsessions with continuities, etc--ie. we always end up asking about how to understand literature in terms of its relationship to its ability to represent, and what it values as worthy of representation. This whole movement in turn depends on believing very strongly in a fundamental separation between literature and criticism, poetry and serious thought. It fails to account for the possiblity that poets took up Plato's prescriptions about poetry not as a condemnation of poetry's function, but as a challenge--to prove that poetry itself could philosophize and indeed be a mode of philosophy itself. The thing about Langland's poem is that so much of it does not seem to be interested in representing an outside world or an outside truth. It is a poem obsessed with 'truthe,' but not in representing it--but in finding it. It would then seem to be a poem which is of its own agency working. <br /><br />So, enter the poem itself. In the early Passus, within a little episode of personification, with the King, and a trial concerning Wrong and company, Reason reads a little thing to the King: "Ne for mede have mercy, but mekenesse it made;/ For "<span style="font-style: italic;">Nullum malum</span> the man mette with <span style="font-style: italic;">inpunitum/ </span>And bad <span style="font-style: italic;">Nullum bonum </span>be <span style="font-style: italic;">irremuneratum."/ </span>Late thi confessour, sire Kynge, construe this on Englissh,/ And if ye werchen it in wek, I wedde myne eris/ That Lawe shal ben a laborer and lede afeld donge, / And Love shal lede thi lond as the leef liketh" (Passus 4:142-148). Now we can read this passage as Reason urging the King to put the law to work, and pay wrong with justice and and good with good etc. In that way some would call it a 'conservative' passage, with its advocacy of simply, a working state legal code which 'works' in that it gets the people into the fields and enforces their injunction to 'work.' But, let's put that aside for a minute, and think about the genius of this formulation of Law as a laborer. Law has a functioning status all its own. It (and perhaps this is just the personification talking, but either way, it makes it happen) seems to be able to go on and work without a specific wielder in this little micro-exhortation. The possibility that a concept can <span style="font-style: italic;">work</span> is truly a fantastic one, and not entirely new to 'modern' criticism, especially that with a nice Marxist bent. But I want to index as here in this little gem of a Langlandian moment, and then keep it in mind when we read a rather key passage a bit later in the work. Keep this in mind, I promise I will return to it in just a second. <br /><br />Later in the poem, in the midst of a dream within a dream, Ymaginatif presents a big challenge to Wil who is sseeking after these three concepts with his poem (Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest) and to all of us who play with our own makings, be they critical or 'creative.' Ymaginatif never was idle (Passus 7:1), apparently always busy forming images in the mind and composing and dividing them so as to actively make up a part of a person's soul, and so he scorns Will's poetry, which he sees as idle. "thou medlest with makyng--and myghtest go sey this Sauter,/ And bidde for hem that yveth thee breed; for there are bokes ynowe/ to telle men what Dowel is, Dobet and Dobest bothe,/ And prechours to preve what it is, of many a peire freres" (7:16-19). For the busy and useful Imaginative, all that's needed apparently are all the books that are already out there and the preachers who can tell us what is in them. We of course might dismiss this as 'typically' medieval or whatever, a recourse to the function of books as preserving not producing knowledge, a recourse to autoritas. But Will insists on the active role of his book--implicitly assigning agency to the book itself: "Ac if ther were any wight that wolde me telle/ What were Dowel and Dobet and Dobest and the last,/ Wolde I nevere do werk, but wende to holi churche..." (7:25-27). It is not only that Wil's work is worthless according to Imaginative, but the book itself. There are bokes ynowe. All that is left is to figure them out. <br /><br />It seems to me that this is an attitude we are sometimes unlucky enough to find still lingering in works of our own contemporaries--in courses, books, papers, ideas, etc. That, if we could only figure out X and/or Y then we would be doing our job. But figuring out X and Y won't necessary produce anything which does any active work, which continues to produce. Call me a Modernist, but we need to be messing around with our makings and trying to make things new, and make new things, even if these are impossible propositions. <br /><br />Hearken now back to the bit about Law being a Laborer. For Wil, it seems that his poetry, his dreaming, all that's tied up in this, as a practice of the poet, the [its important to him] christian, the thinker, theologian, student, etc--that all this is itself Work, a practice. But the only way that this actually responds to the problem of there being 'books enough' already, is if this implicitly implies that the book itself if also able to Work. If there was a book that was already working to find Dowel et al., then he wouldn't need to write one. <br /><br />We need books that can understand this structure, even if they aren't all in tuned with project of harmonizing orthodox belief (I would hope my books are nothing of the sort, at least). We need lots of books. We need books to be working, and working for us. Each little book we send out there, if a reader runs up (or, for that matter, rubs up) against it, is laboring in our efforts. And if those efforts be revolutionary, then, each little book, in its small way, is a kind of wind-up-toy with a secular-soul, a little soldier, actively working when in the absence of, sometimes against, our 'presence'--but as a laborer and a producer. These books aren't for producing knowledge. Such books seriously mess with--or could, if we caressed them rightly--with most literary history. They are for thinking, and looking for things. Books think, look for, pursue. Books don't contain.dan remeinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330573992530221819.post-83653476786482824602008-10-12T23:22:00.006-04:002008-10-14T00:22:21.114-04:00Caught with your pants down--naming, being, and fetishes<span style="font-size:85%;"><i><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family:courier new;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:arial;">EDIT: As these things were still in play when I first posted this, I didn't mention that in addition to the Amazing Anna K., others invovled in the project I discuss below are, the Not-to-be-messed-with Nicola Masciandaro, and the Ever-Evanescent Eileen Joy.</span></span></span></span></span><br /><br /><br />Et quant il les vit en apert<br />Que do bois furent descovert,<br />Sit vit les hauberz fremïenz<br />Et les hiaumes clerz et luisanz<br />Et vit lo vert et lo vermoil<br />Reluire contre lo soloit<br />Et l'or et l'azur et l'argent,<br />Si li fu molt tres bel et gent<br />Et dit Biaus sire Dex, merci!<br />Ce sont ange que je voi ci.<br /></i>(Chrétien de Troyes, <i>Perceval</i>, La Pochotèque, 120-132)<br /><br /><i>Commant avez vos non, amis?<br />Et cil qui son non ne savoit<br />Devine et dit que il avoit<br />Percevaus li Gualois a non,<br />N ne set s'il dit voir o non,<br />Mais il dit voir, et si no sot.</i><br />(<i>Perceval,</i> 3509-3515)<br /><br /><i>It was a chainless bicycle, with a freewheel, if such a bicycle exits. Dear bicycle, I shall not call you bike, you were green, like so many of your generation, I don't know why. It is a pleasure to meet it again. To describe it at length would be a pleasure. It had a little red horn instead of the bell fashionable in your days. To blow this horn was for me a real pleasure, almost a vice. I will go further and declare that if I were obliged to record, in a roll of honour, those activities which in the course of my interminable existence have given me only a mild pain in the balls, the blowing of a rubber horn--toot!--would figure among the first. And when I had to part from bicycle I took off the horn and kept it about me. I believe I have it still, somewhere, and if i blow it no more it is because it has gone dumb. Even motor-cars have no horns nowadays, as I understand the thing, or rarely. When I see one, through the lowered window of a stationary car, I often stop and blow it. This should all be written in the pluperfect. What a rest to speak of bicycles and horns. </i><br />(Samuel Beckett, <i>Molloy</i>, Grove Centenary Ed. Vol II, 12)<br /><br /><i>Yes, my mind felt it surely, this tiny sediment, incomprehensibly stirring like grit at the bottom of summer weighted and the splendid summer sky. And suddenly I remembered my name, Molloy. My name is Molly, I cried, all of a sudden, now I remember. Nothing compelled me to give this information, but I gave it, hoping to please, I suppose. They let me keep my hat on, I don't know why. Is it your mother's name? said the sergeant...</i><br />(<i>Molloy</i>, 18)</span><br /><br /><br /><br />I had a little chat with Jeffrey Cohen last weekend at SEMA. He, shall we say, encouraged me to take up the blog again. Well, maybe he was just observing that I haven't been blogging much at all for along time. But I am going to choose to interpret those words as encouraging.<br /><br />I can't promise anything. NYU is keeping me on my toes. But there are so many things I want to be blogging about, and its such a fantastic way to feel like one is being <i>read</i>, that perhaps its just worth a shot. I will try to get my SEMA paper up also, but I need to format it for HTML with the notes and all, and I can be sorta slow with that. And I haven't given up on my little story either!<br /><br />As an opening salvo, I will throw out a few very very preliminary thoughts on a current project, one I am lucky enough to be working on (the gravity that needs to fall on the word 'lucky' here cannot possibly be enough) with the wonderful Anna Klosowska. The gist of the project is best summed up at this point by a list of key nodes: Perceval, Beckett, Heidegger; language, humannesses, feelings. But that's crazy, you say? Why yes, thank you very much.<br /><br />I am starting with some very obvious resonances. Beckett deals with characters that are so fully spoken by language one can read him and believe Heidegger's whole thing about language speaking Dasein and not the other way 'round. Perceval also operates, in my mind, as such a text. I have always felt that the best preparation for reading Beckett's novels was found in reading Chrétien. The idea of the Romance is so fully flowing into these novels which go on and on and on, with seemingly unmotivated plots and mysteriously opaque characters, arising magnificently and marvelously out of their worlds--. What I'm saying in part is that both can be loved (and I mean erotically), but only with a certain queer patience.<br /><br />Beyond that though, there are some more specific resonances, between which I would like to touch the feeling of an affective connection betwixt how each set of texts speaks various--yes, let us say it--humans. One such moment might arise from thinking Perceval as a phenomenon, an event of Being, and thinking Molloy also as a phenomenon--an event of either Being or nonBeing but an event either way. Both have to upspring from the ground cleared by the language that speaks them. And they seem to upspring in these really silly (but, because they are so, deadly serious) cracks in the narrative and language of the work: Moments which themselves are fetishes, to be seen (as they see and arrest you) as partial nonteleological and wildly non-sequitor textual phenomena. So, part of the crux is that these humans are spoken by language, but only by a shard of language, and so their worlds are also arrested in these discrete and bounded fetish-fragments of language--and the way they must then function as Beings in a world is only ever always in partial fetishized relation to World and World and others--and thus never participating in World as we know as in a totality of relations.<br /><br />In the quotes above, Perceval and Molloy are both caught with their pants down. Molloy is being questioned, for doing something apparently offensive (though in the seemingly authoritarian police state of the novel, it may have been totally arbitrary) in public with his beloved bicycle that has him so besotted [and on 'besotted,' I can only say how amazing Anna's paper at SEMA last week was], and Perceval, for not asking any questions of the marvels which had <i>him</i> so besotted chez fisher-king the previous night, so that this wildly mourning girl can tell him that he's pretty much ruined his and a bunch of others' lives as a result. In both scenes, both remember their names. Wild. They just don't know for sure either, but it seems to work for both of them.<br /><br />Among some other things, it is this moment of naming, by language, in language, which has me in total wonder right now. As soon as Perceval divines his name, this girl tells him a whole set of other names which befit him better, and his now messed-up fate. Later in Beckett's novel, the narrator-Molloy writes "And even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate, as we have just seen I think. And so on for all the other things which made merry with my senses. Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names. I say that now, but after all what do i know now about then, now when the icy words hail down upon me, the icy meanings, and the world dies too, foully named. All I know is what the words know, and the dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning, middle and an end as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead. And truly it little matters what I say, this of that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out of your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept." (27).<br /><br />What is hard to penetrate of what makes merry with the senses is a concept that is now hard to penetrate, but perhaps only because it is so wispy. Because what makes merry with the senses is language itself. But that is only because everything is language and language is everything. Not the prison-house of language, but--well, I don't know. Language speaks, catches hold a fragment of Being, a fragment of a wispy being catches on a fragment of a language and is spoken--here embraced as a fetish in the non-sequitor word. The the arbitrary word (where the World itself is a word and made of words and the World is always already a Language), makes for not a thing you could have yourself invented as your self, but a very silly Lesson. So, it is in speaking that you let language speak you. But, not as some high modernist empty form, or platonist perfected eidos. Waves and particles need something to move through or reflect off of. This all must move through sense--and this is the erotics of its upspringing. <br /><br />I'm not sure that makes any sense to me, and I need to think through better the actual logic of all of this. Consider that an initial waxing poetical in the most profane senses of the term.dan remeinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330573992530221819.post-73095615273669559432008-09-09T00:22:00.003-04:002008-09-09T00:24:14.080-04:00felicitious announcementsHey readers! A happy announcement from <span style="font-style: italic;">Whiskey & Fox</span>, as well as a new open call for submissions: <a href="http://whiskeyandfox.blogspot.com">http://whiskeyandfox.blogspot.com</a>dan remeinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.com0