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Since I left the horse in the paddock I shall let it wander a bit. <snip> It's in the space between 'nearly' and 'identical' that things like poetry happen. [DB] <snip> <snip> One tries to confront history, stand up to it - knowing that it will always, as Hegel said, "leave a remainder"; that it will probably digest one's effort. [FP] <snip> Indeed. 'Nearly' is not *identity*. 'A concept does not,' as was said, 'exhaust the thing conceived of.' Time is about comparison which is, in turn, about time, about how we conceive of 'nearly': thus the experience of alterity, comparing the new self with how the self seemed to be; thus the experience of time's 'passing' by comparing the new world with how the old world seemed to be. Time both changes and stays the same. And because we cannot completely reach either aspect without destroying the other, we have to live time asymptotically. But of course that rarely happens: too often we opt for reductions one type of which is the sort of finalising vision in which either time eventually grinds to a halt or else it leads ineluctably to some idealised stationary point: vulgar Darwinianism; Progress; Hegel; even poor, wretched Fukayama. Unfortunately, having got into it, I don't think one gets out of the problem of finality by any sort of philosophically muscular *confrontation*. Nor is it the case, with all of this in mind, that the abhorred alternative - <snip> The noodling, non sequiturs, inscrutable allusions, crossed-out or superimposed lines, chance juxtapositions etc. of the avant-garde are to me the same product in different packaging, with different additives - more astringent and depersonalized, hence more attractive to academic intellectuals. [FP] <snip> - actually founders in these terms (becomes noodling and so forth) simply because narrative has been abandoned altogether. The narrative of evolution is, after all, every bit as much mere juxtaposition as any nasty pomo's problematic poetising. Rather it fails where it often does because the abandonment of *grand narrative*, the narrative of finality, has simply been left as a gap (philosophically Baudrillard seems to me to get into exactly this kind of difficulty) so that the constant change of diachronic encounter has no stability, no 'remainder' against which to measure itself and everything becomes *pointless*. The hands on the clock go endlessly round without ever, as it were, moving *forwards*. There is no accumulation, no *experience* as such. A similar accumulation (of unowned *experience* as language) seems to me one possible definition of what poetry works with, insofar as one ever needs one: not the instrumental substitution of 'the thing conceived of' for the *thing* nor yet some sort of over-emphasis of the gap but simply an excess of *meaning* over what is meant and the (at)tension between the two. This is a different sort of 'remainder'. However, I don't think it has much to do with narrative as such and it connects with Dominic's 'subtract[ion] ... from the language of everyday reportage' only in the sense that _as a practice_ working in this way subtracts itself from negative side of 'everyday reportage', from how expressivity is always captured and reduced. CW _______________________________________________ 'Life is too precious to spend it with important people.' (Harry Partch)