Dear Alison,
I just want to respond that I read this initial posting with a whoosh of
recognition, and am enjoying the subsequent dialogue. I've felt something
like this state which seems to be conversant with language both at moments
of extreme experience and in writing. A lot of the yapping falls away and
however doubtful you remain, there is something without doubt that acts or
addresses. As soon as you try and bring that into the realm of terminology
you find that, firstly, such worlds resist it linguistically; and, secondly,
it has already become, through such an attempt, just another subjective
sensation. It's as though the very thing you're trying to capture in
language is already present, it's just that usually you can't evoke or hear
it. But it comes through in a fine poem. Links for me with Kavanagh post-op:
that serene experimentation.
Best,
Bill H
-----Original Message-----
From: Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]>
To: British-Poets List <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 14 March 2000 14:03
Subject: RE: value v. virus
>
>> In a post from Tony Baker the other day I have the
>> record of how one more
>> open poet responds to a text, and I reproduce it
>> with his permission:
>>
>> On Tue, 7 Mar 2000, Tony Baker wrote:
>you know that
>> > whatever integrity a thing has goes through an
>> utterly sensual world. I
>> > don't honestly think we can ever know much that
>> doesn't pass through the
>> > physiology - we see what a thing means, or we miss
>> it.
>>
>Or we _feel_ what a things means (which this
>experience suggests more than _see_).
>
>This prompts me to something I've been privately
>worrying at - a different kind of "knowing" which
>became very clear while I was in labour with my first
>child. Very rough, I'm afraid, but I'm sure you're
>used to that... One thing is, this particular
>experience was a radical one in my life: I came out of
>the experience of labour changed, changed utterly.
>
>When I was in labour with my first child, I was in
>total panic. It hurt more than I expected and was
>also an experience over which I had no control. But
>underneath, or behind, this panic was an
>overwhelmingly clear experience of another kind of
>knowing, and this knowing was not panicked at all.
>This Voice - it reached consciousness through language
>- was very still and calm inside my head. It "knew"
>what was happening to my body. It knew exactly when
>the baby was coming, causing a flurry among the
>midwives, who were totally unprepared, and it "knew"
>that nothing was wrong. It even "knew" how I should
>breathe in order to minimise pain, although this
>didn't get applied until the birth of my daughter,
>when the hospital midwife asked me if I had been
>"taking classes" (I hadn't) to the fury of my own
>midwife. But the politics of _that_ birth are an
>entirely different story.
>
>Now, this "instinct" was perhaps a rare upwelling of
>anterior consciousness into conscious thought,
>prompted by the physical extremity of childbirth. One
>of the things about my experience of it - and I make
>no apologies for the subjectivity of the experience,
>since there is no other way to talk about it - was
>that it was not a raw, undifferentiated,
>pre-linguistic knowing. It couldn't be said, for
>example, to be infantile, apart from the fact that
>infants don't have babies... It was quite specific
>and clear, and revealed itself as knowledge -
>knowledge, moreover, which it was impossible for me to
>have by experience, since I had never undergone
>childbirth before.
>
>It was physical knowledge about my own body, the same
>kind of knowledge of cats who have their first litter,
>when they clean and care for their young: what is
>usually called "instinct" or "intuition", which is
>placed in a heirachy of thought way below the complex
>of intellection. This kind of knowledge has had very
>bad press from theorisers of knowledge. It is
>considered brutish, blind, undifferentiated,
>primitive, and placed in opposition to, or beneath,
>"thought": perhaps "primitive" thought, past which
>human beings have supposedly evolved.
>
>My experience of this knowledge made me think that it
>is very closely linked to what we think of as
>intelligence. It was precise, differentiated and
>sure. My experience is inflected through the fact that
>I am a languaged being, and I think in language, in
>words. And this knowledge presented itself to me in
>words, quite literally as a "voice". And believe me,
>there was nothing mystic about it: or it was as
>mystical as childbirth itself. But I was very aware
>of a split between my ordinarily conscious mind (the
>panicking bit) and something other.
>
>Now, if "instinct" is expressed in language, how can
>it simply be pre-linguistic and therefore a function
>of the primitive animal? If I had not experienced
>childbirth before, how could I "know" what was
>happening to my body (I was of course very well
>informed theoretically, in that I knew precisely the
>descriptions of physiological processes, but they bore
>no resemblance at all to what was actually happening
>to me and were no help when it actually came to it).
>There is of course the possibility that the only way
>that this instinct could present itself to my
>panicking conscious mind was through language and so
>my languaged mind "translated" it. But that doesn't
>feel right. More a feeling that this knowledge might
>be a dimension of language itself, a dimension that is
>tacitly accepted every time we speak? And especially
>so in poems?
>
>I need to work out a vocabulary...
>
>Whenever I read philosophers, who almost to a man talk
>about Man (meaning, of course, either man or woman, as
>is often footnoted, but the context often begs the
>question) the wicked thought occurs to me that most
>women really wouldn't bother with all that, because
>it's all the wrong questions. My problem with a lot
>of philosophy is that it bullies this kind of knowing
>out of existence, with its language and vocabularies
>and categorisations, and its heirachies of knowing.
>All those dizzying, useless structures designed to
>prove the Authority of Thought. Aah, but I was always
>impatient.
>
>Best
>
>Alison
>__________________________________________________
>Do You Yahoo!?
>Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger.
>http://im.yahoo.com
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|