From: Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]>
"Whoa, that Hyslop quote is mightily shod with Authority, which stamps
reality in an unvarying mint, in its own image, I suppose, like God.
Given that being insane deprives one of many legal rights, perhaps
being made illegal or made insane amounts to the same thing.  If he
was the best of the doctors who attended Woolf, it perhaps explains a
few things, since he clearly eschewed the "obscure" living tissue in
favour of legible bone, like those fossils in museums with
copperplate handwritten labels."

Yes, Hyslop was much concerned with "Authority" and felt
it could be granted only to art that, as you said earlier,
was "located" in identifiable experience, though
"identifiable" would have meant in his thinking what
fit the social norms of being and thinking, a most
narrow definition.

"I suppose I think a work of art is simultaneously artefact and
dynamic being birthed out of feeling; this seems not to be
contradictory to me, but obvious.  But there are probably better ways
of thinking about this which indicates some kind of singular
struggle, rather than a dialectic of feeling and reason, or form and
content, which this idea invites."

Yes, I see what you mean, but I too, given the state of my brain
this morning am perhaps unable to come up with a different
way of thinking about this, except to say that part of this
distinction is related to time and perspective. The "dynamic being birthed"
perhaps corresponding to the actuality of the making, the writing,
etc., and "the artefact" afterwards, and both combined because
the assumed point of view is the artist's or maker. I'm not
sure that the reader views the work as an "artefact," for that too
is some different but dynamic process of birthing out of the
reader's feeling, but the one who made it and felt the dynamic
of birthing out of feeling in the making of it, would, or might.
So, as you say, one could not "read" one's own work in a way,
for whom it is an artefact being finished or abandoned.

"It seems to me perhaps it is not
so much as Rukeyser says in the quote, that one writes in order to
feel, but that one writes in order to know what one feels. And maybe
I would think it a bit of a problem if the only way you could feel
would be if you wrote."

Ha, yes, it would be a problem if the only way you could feel
would be if you wrote! and, yes, I think writing "in order
to know what one feels" is closer to it, though the terms
perhaps of knowing what one feels are perhaps too determined.
I think of it sort of as in the Spanish word "alumbrar" which
is to birth a child but also to bring to light, for a child
doesn't exist exactly in the same way in the womb as once
without it, and so it is more an emergence than a knowing of.

Best,

Rebecca

Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com








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