Alison

I've managed now (11.50 pm here) to snatch a moment at least for parts of
this:

It's a very boggy ground this, this direct addressing of words to not words,
something probably better handled through poetry and its analogic shifts.
Language is substantive, is a physical modulation of whatever it is that
'really' is, it turns upon the air, or on electromagnetic fields, the letter
'o' will make its own shape in the sand. Word-language is cognitive, but
everywhere else forms generate languages - music, mathematics, light itself.
I suspect that possibly your difficulty lies in the phrase 'reality as a
text' which I'd agree can be shrivelled into a reductive way of seeing, a
sucking-in of otherness into a nothing-hold of words about words. But
language is a dialogue with that out there, a pushing out, an attempt to
stabilise being. If you see the text as a live thing, an illumination of
manuscript rather than a shorn aridity of dispute, a try-yet-again of a mode
of consciousness that can not even remember its own inception, nor precisely
what it might have been thinking at, say,  3.37 last Thursday, nor at this
moment what the definition of a 'stitherum' doesn't exclude, of a voice that
will keep on trying to make sense of things until that one day that....,
because it has to, because Pandora opened the box, because there's no going
back, because unconscious innocence isn't a waking option, because....

ah well, it's getting late

best

david bircumshaw
----- Original Message -----
From: <[log in to unmask]>
To: British poets <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, August 28, 2000 1:24 PM
Subject: Re: De Sade's manners of thinking


> A ps to my post, although I wish David had already responded as he said
> he will:
>
> I thought of mentioning the Judaeic God, which was a brilliant invention
> to create a united people against the oppression of slavery (a god who is
> a word cannot be smashed like a god who is a statue; also, a god who is
> absent and omnipotent bears a similarity to Foucault's pantechnicon,
> since he cannot be disproved and is therefore in need a useful figure of
> authority).
>
> The making of the Word as the primary reality, the primordial inscription
> from which all things emanate, is a shift of the relationship between
> language and reality from which we've never really recovered.  I lay a
> large number of complaints about Western civilisation at the feet of that
> shift, and don't feel I have to, or ought to, subscribe to it.  Surely
> one of the functions of poetry is to question this, to inhabit a deep
> scepticism about language itself?  The postmodern dogma that reality is a
> text seems only the most recent manifestation of the Judaeic god.  The
> definition of humanness as a function of language has always struck me as
> deeply suspect; the belief that language shapes reality more hopeful than
> actual.  Perhaps it is easier to believe that, than to examine the other
> things which might shape it more violently.
>
> I know it's an old argument:  but no matter how I parse it, I can't make
> language the primary shaping thing.  The most profound experiences seem
> to me to be wordless, and language shifts after, limpingly catching up.
>
> Best
>
> Alison
>
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