Going back to Alison's critique of male appropriation of the language of
female gender/birth processes - and the use of the words to describe the
process of making an art work, poems included - made me think a little more.
I don't know if women 'own' that language of birth or, whether, ironically
it was a vocabulary created by men to describe the 'mystery' of what was
happening to 'their women', I have no idea. I personally get a kick out of
women - often lesbians - who appropriate male expressions (often from
sports) to describe one feat or another - and thereby denying a male sense
of linguistic control of those particular feats. I like all this
cross-pollination and, somebody no doubt will say, these pollinations help
"grow the language."
I must say I have a greater affection for the 'romantic' terms than some of
alternatives. In the seventies, I remember getting offended when the music
biz people started to refer to the work of their artists as "product" - as
if there was no difference between "units" of cereal boxes, and vinyl with
great covers. (Like say compare "Sergeant Pepper" cover with a box of Tide
laundry soap). And then later on, Marxist lit crit folks, talking about
"cultural production" - into which my propensity to loaf and dream before
writing anything seemed at automatic odds, or not part of the assembly line
that produces "product". (Well, maybe "loafing" could be called a "loss
leader"!)
It's also gets amusing to see what happens when poets incorporate language
or metaphors from the sciences into poems. The words do not always age well.
The other day I was teaching Kenneth Rexroth's beautiful, "Signature of All
Things." However, the class could not understand why he had used the word
"electrolysis" at one point in the poem - for most of them it was not a term
of chemical process meant to evoke and equate with a mystical perception of
natural ferment, but a painful, cosmetic medical procedure.
Say, an androgynous Christ can also get pregnant! It would seem.
Unlike taking ownership of any particular and/or traditional vocabulary, I
think it's part of this period's comedy, as well as sometimes tragic combat,
to see these vocabularies variously collapse around us. Sorting through to
find 'the truth' becomes a daily occasion. "Impregnation" to give birth to
children - for example - as a process these days is much more various than
say 20 years ago.
Stephen V
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
> On Thu, 2007-01-25 at 17:32 +0900, Janet Jackson wrote:
>> Chris, are you trying to wind us up here?
>
> Ha! Try a wind up. Never read Freud as real but as rhetorical
> figuration... Lacan got it from Freud who got it from Kant who got it
> from Hume's theory of fiction as self sustaining relational connections
> in which the terms of relations are external to relations and terms are
> forces as relations of forces which is power which is Foucault's
> discourse analysis methodology. (Really, I am not joking... getting
> pregnant is a virus you can catch from anyone if you are not careful and
> take precautions..:)
>
> BUT... thank you Alison! I didn't know about the medieval pregnant
> Christ. My religious education is somewhat lacking as I was thrown out
> of religious instruction classes at school. Definitely the connection
> with Romanticism is there as well as Nazi aesthetics which is based on
> Romantic aesthetics. I managed to log onto my university server and the
> academic literature on this subject is huge. I got one article on
> Marinetti (sp?) the fascist futurist poet which sounds worthwhile, as
> well. Maybe I should chase up a pregnant Christ since this does make
> sense in terms of medieval scholasticism.
>
> Academics seem to write a lot of long articles... don't they have
> anything better to do? (I suspect job security, promotion and pay rises
> depend on the number of times published in scholarly journals. I can't
> understand in this case why I am tolerated as a member of the university
> research community.)
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