<snip>
You miss the implications of the last lines in "A Short History" which say,
specifically, Goodbye to All That. That's exactly the move that is made.
[Joe G]
<snip>
But it's not a 'move' as such, in the sense of a shift in levels because the
piece is all on one level, albeit the surface is choppy. From 'Here is how I
am telling you I make love to my wife' onwards your frame and distance
technique is pretty well unmistakeable and it's implicit very much earlier:
narrative modes (eg 'I am meek at work and participate with enthusiasm in
group activities'), deliberate inconsistencies, framing and distancing
technologies such as tape recorders and cameras, 'Vietnam movies', the tv,
the 'coffee table book', other distancing effects ('You see that I am very
sentimental [...] Is this too easy? Yes. [...] You understand. You are
also sentimental'). And, of course, 'I threw my father's hammer / through
the screen. Incoming. I kicked my cousin in the face', which precedes
those final lines. The *embarrassment* which audiences within the text and
readers of the text should suffer is _assumed_ more or less from the outset;
that's the point. It's one of several possible ways in which *otherness* can
disappear or be suppressed.
Incidentally do you know Hockney's *Picture Emphasising Stillness* in which
two men are separated from a pouncing leopard by the inscription 'They are
perfectly safe, this is a still'?
<snip>
Fred: I love your 2-circles exercise; it reminded me of a fascinating book
called _Laws of Form_ (1969?) by G. Spencer Brown [Candice W]
<snip>
Interesting that you thought of Spencer Brown. My thoughts ran to Gordon
Pask, who very much drew on GSP. In particular to the idea that
understanding happens in the space (including conflictual space) between two
actors.
Fred's 'Then I merge the two circles' sounds like subsumption to me, not
least since one of them is smaller. But what if *truth* arises through the
tensions between public and private lives?
<snip>
Poetry in so far as it has value is exactly a confirmation of what one
already knows simultaneously with a revelation that one hadn't realized one
knows it.
Actually that's Plato. [Jon C]
<snip>
Is Plato sound on poetry? '[A]ll [...] poetry is a narration of events.' But
poets are functionaries, subsumed within the public business of the State:
'now the founders of a State ought to know the general forms in which poets
should cast their tales, and the limits which must be observed by them, but
to make the tales is not their business.' Moreover Plato's *poetry* can be
mind-damaging stuff: we must not 'have mothers under the influence of the
poets' and 'the greater the poetical charm [of unacceptable passages] the
less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free,
and who should fear slavery more than death'. So hurrah for socialist
realism and suchlike!
Actually the 'revelation' referred to above sounds a lot like a revelation
of alterity. It's also the point in all too many conversations when alterity
is refused and two interlocutors stop arguing about what is *true* and start
arguing about which of them said it first.
<snip>
poetry is not about creativity or uplifting people but about risk, great
risk, hurtling oneself at the boundaries of language, ears pressed to the
borders of the structure and hearing its constraints, which also indicate
_openings_. [Doug B]
<snip>
That sounds rather too heroic and rather too self con(s)t(r)ained. Again I
think of Hockney's leopard. But what if one forgets about boundaries and
responds instead to, say, *desire*? (Maybe Anny was heading in this
direction with her reference to Kristeva.)
CW
_______________________________________________
'Listen people, I don't know how you expect to ever stop the
war if you can't sing any better than that'
- Country Joe McDonald, Woodstock 1969
|