1994
1994
1994
1994
1994
7 June 1994
Berkeley, California
1995
1995
22 August 1995
1995
1995
1995
it's a parabola! that's it, when you get to my age, words and books are-oh!-up-so-down, of varied mind: the lane beside my home beaten by cars turning into electric garages, out of house/into house-garbage cans and compost bins-a wildness of clematis climbs the telephone wires which birds mark and squirrels trapeze above cats stalking-scavengers, who are shadows of this culture's wounds go by the bye, looking for beer cans to cash in-metaphoric traffic of two materialities of what we are in language, its fingering grasp and streetwise mica wander in the slick that language left when it flew through the air, unsexual and transmundane-and cared less that desire composes nature-uncovered facts of whose body-in-pieces-
i g October 1996
this lovely mind, but the word fall is, for me, too loaded with a theological beforeness-rather, he or she may step into oblivion-the state or act of being forgotten-an answer in real terms-philosophical as they are-of our exit from origin, that summertime and lacy curtain where we become
1996
for Samuel Truitt
August 1996
October 1998
1998
1998
(Musil
(Descartes
(Philosophy ioo
(Zukofsky
(Deleuze
as paradises must
2000
for Patrick Wright
1 January 2000
(Flaubert
(Archilochus
(Edwin Muir
(Ben)amin
(Agamben
(Kafka
(Kafka
(Sordello
(See Sollers
(Agamben
Written for Jery Zaslove. I've long noted the word love in his name.
i October 2000
the speech born-in-one's-house is that which we acquire without rule
De Vulgari Eloquentia I.1
The language for which we have no words, which doesn't pretend, like grammatical language, to be there before being, but is `alone and first in mind,' is our language, that is, the language of poetry.
Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose
Face to face, but without seeing each other from now on, the gods and men are abandoned to writing. This abandonment is the sign given to us for our history yet to come. It has only just begun. My god! We are only beginning to write.
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community
entering the territory-map is not territory-the boy looked up from the book he held in his lap, startled that it seemed the size of half of himself it was so large compared to Emerson, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, Longfellow around the houseGustave Dore's Inferno of the dark forest, where the boy's mind multiplied the leopard, lion and wolf in his heart-heart and mind were then entwinedentered the writhing trees, drew back from Geryon, as if to hide, touched the page of flames that were not raindrops, swept his hand over the streaming anguish in the air, felt the chill black of the ice around winged Lucifer, who chewed on something with two legs that he didn't want to imagine-in bed at night after saying `please, if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take'-which was very hard to think about-he returned before he slept to Dore's imagery-under the covers with a flashlight-and nearly always forgot the two small
Korzybski
figures high on a rocky promontory, who looked up at the stars-territory is not map-there, going from inside out and outside in, he could not yet think how ancient he was, where the phenomena of consciousness are the phenomena of religion-this is the boy of the house in Idaho, a railcar, painted Union Pacific yellow, by the railway tracks, goldenrod garden of wandstems-grandmother Sophia Nichols whose telegraphic mind knew the distances-in the sagebrush desert during the Great Depression-entangled with Dante before and after he learned to read-the innocence of walking there is forgotten-
Ruth Padel
1930
`That means,' said I, somewhat amused, `that we would have to eat of the tree of knowledge a second time to fall back into the state of innocence.'
Kleist
'Of course,' he answered, `and that is the final chapter in the history of the world.'
I address Dante, who is our contemporary, like us, speaking out of human violence-who is implicit in our use of our mother tongues-who is initial and continuously implicated in the courage of poetry-whose art records an attachment to the letter that lay at the mysterious origin of poetry-the dazzlementwho is concealed in the depth of our culture like a blind spotwhose journey in poetry reverses the metaphysics of a transparent language-whose daring in the realms of the sacred proposes it poema sacro-propositions of the mind in that scattered territory-of whom the story is told that at the moment he began the Comedy all the rhymes of the world presented themselves and asked to be included-of whom Mandelstam, studying Italian in order to read him, writes:
Saussure
Sollers
cited Sollers
trans. Harris & Link
When I began to study Italian and had barely familiarized myself with its phonetics and prosody, I suddenly understood that the center of gravity of my speech efforts had been moved closer to my lips, to the outer parts of my mouth. The tip of the tongue suddenly turned out to have the seat of honour. The sound rushed toward the locking of teeth. And something else that struck me was the infantile aspect of Italian phonetics, its beautiful child-like quality, its closeness to infant babbling, to some kind of eternal Dadaism... . Would you like to become acquainted with the dictionary of Italian rhymes? Take the entire Italian dictionary and leaf through it as you will. . . . Here every word rhymes. Every word begs to enter into concordanza. The abundance of marriageable endings is fantastic-the astonishment that is Dante, of whom Yeats wrote in his 191 5 poem EGO DOMINUS TUUS:
but it is not the self that made this face so plain to our mind's eye after him, and certainly not his arguments for Church and Empire, but more likely the colours he gave to language-first, in his room una nebula di colore di fuoco-then, within this colour of fire, a figure spoke in the high language of divinity-Ego dominus tuus-eros and nakedness that overwhelm-he thought he saw una cosa, la quale ardesse tutta-the voice said, Vide car tuum-he had not recognized his heart in flames where it was eaten-this discovery of Beatrice in the shaping of a world-the colours of this event in language fly in the flag of Italy-
La Vita nova
La Vita nova
the face moves among the beautiful letters, never still in the alpha/omega, the A through Z of our vernacular tongues-born in the house of the heart's mind that is the mind's heart-purposed to make it known to many-that they might flame in their alphabets saluting all the fedeli d'Amore that they might answerDante, drawing upon the Provencal experience of the reason of poems, brings us to Amors-Giorgio Agamben tells us Amors is the name the Troubadours gave to the experience of the advent of the poetic word.... It is difficult to understand the sense in which poets understood love, as long as we obstinately construe it according to a secular misunderstanding, in a purely biographical context. For the Troubadours, it is not a question of psychological or biographical events that are successively expressed in words, but rather, of the attempt to live the topos itself, the event of language as a fundamental amorous and poetic experience-the loved experience is found in the poetics of unmapped territory-thus, the New Life is the possibility larger than and other than the mere expression of the sentiments of subjective reality or of the self, which is as much a lifetime creation as is the poesis of the traditional soul-this event of our vernacular speechnot to be confused with language as an object of knowledge constructed by philosophers and linguists, but a part of language, a mode of language use, that is a discourse-with the heart of-actual social interac
tion and practice-witness Sordello-disdegnosa-mourning Sir Blancatz-
Michel de Certeau / Godzich
Purgatorio VI
trans. Ezra Pound
love's reason reasoning, which Dante tells us it would be shame not to explain, enters into the discourses of the territory called world-the poetic is the language of the mapless-
Dante's gift is continuously contemporary in the shape he gave his poem's discoursing-out of the advent of language one's life in language, as if life were the home of it-where the intimacy of sound discloses the Amors of othernesses-in La Vita nuova, the interplay of love and reason, poem and prose, Dante and Beatrice, friends and beloved ladies opens into a territory-even Beyond the widest of the circling spheres-where The Comedy entangles the amorous with the discoursing of myth, cosmology, philosophy, theology, history, economics, and current issues-even as Beatrice's colours-white, crimson, and green-circle my early morning coffee cup, while I write-this is the polyphony of The Comedythe ever changing polyphony of amorous thought-
the gift of the amorous and poetic experience so entangledthe face haunting the curious laughter of the syllables-that we might speak an ethics out of this mapless century of ourselves-'at home,' so to speak, in the unredeemable and irreparable-transmigrators-of humanism, of religions, of absolutes, of ignorant hierarchies-when the sublime collapses upon us-as it did upon Dante-we are inside the condition of it-marking our footsteps among its uncanny pieces-holding on to the love of our ordinary lives-hearted or unhearted-Dante, `the Tuscan Homer,' as Vico called him, is exemplar of the necessary poesis in a vast territory-not exactly human-even as we take up the task of our ongoing departure from the totality he confronted-
Hanna Arendt, Men in Dark Times
Sollers
in the difficult matter of God in the streets-facilis descensus Averno-it is easy today to descend to Avernus, as the Sibyl tells us in the voices of Posillipo-there the door of Dis is open twenty-four hours a daylike the doors of the current return to religionwhose concern is with the definition of abomination and exclusion-
Aeneid VI.126
in La Vita nuova, Dante proposes that love, which is meaning, impels speech-
Sollers
the Inferno does not come to rest in those brutalities of God's judgment-in hell speech is fixed once and for allwords stop dead in the depths of a bloody and frozen silence-the entire human body is devoured-in agonizing contrast to the love that eats the flaming heart-Philippe Sollers, in his brilliant contemporary reading of Dante, notices that self-interest-the closed self-is a fundamental characteristic of the damned, which has consequences: Language turns upon and possesses him who believed he possessed it but in fact was only one of its signs-
Sollers
trans. Burton Raffel
the reader who stops there in the drama of closed meaning will lose Dante-including the Dante who haunts our discordant departure from Christendomthe Inferno fascinates with its imagination of the condition of irredeemable loss-the lost good of the intellectwe rebel at the theological imprisonment and abandonment-and suspect that Dante now and again does so too-in this icehouse of language words, we think, must thaw-we are, perhaps, closer to rebellious Rabelais than we know-when Pantagruel hears thawed out words: he threw on the deck in front of us handsful of frozen words, which might have been sugared almonds, like so many pearls of different colours. We saw bright red words, green words, blue words, black words, golden words. And after they had been warmed for a bit between our hands, they melted like snow and we actually heard them, but without understanding a word, for they were in a barbarous language... .
... Panurge asked Pantagruel to give him more. Pantagruel observed that giving words was like making love.
`Then sell me some,' said Panurge.
`Selling words,' said Pantagruel, `is more like what lawyers do. I'd prefer to sell you silence and make you pay more for it....'
But still he threw three or four handsful on to the deck. And we could see sharp words, bloody words (which, according to the pilot, sometimes went back to the place where they'd been spoken, only to find the throat that uttered them had been slit open), horrible words, and many others unpleasant to see. And when they'd melted, we heard: hin, hin, hin, hin, tick, tock, whizz, gibber, jabber, frr, frrr, frrr, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, crack, track, trr, trr, trr, trrr, trrrrr, on, on, on, on, wooawooawooon, gog, magog, and God only knows....
Cosi gridai con la faccia levata-this I cried with lifted face, from among the sodomites-
Inferno XVI.76
Inferno-facing Dante's theology-even a Roman Catholic amen from childhood-of the immutable and unchanging-recognizing that it is the vocabulary of his cosmology-of creation and continuation-in the body of thought-this entanglement of language and death-mortality's speechlessness-repetitious or masquerading in our own vocabulary of such territory-I walk into a crisis of where Hell is-out of this cosmology-gone in the teeth-among twentieth-century Constitutions and religious pretensions-Yes! to be `clean of these hell-obsessions' in another world, as Pound said, discovering Hell on the surface of the earth-where, as in Dante, the present might be found-this sense of exit and departure-`from the first canto to the last, the poet's path was the path of the living man'-at stake in the poesis-finding the life of form-in so vast a territory-practices of the self and of freedom within these games of truth, turning round and round in, say, your marvelous kitchen-to impart relish-I read this great, vulnerable poem-materiality of language-materiality of form-materiality of men's and women's bodies envisioning-as if they were my own-thus, to unravel the Western paradigm of one sole truth-that cannot find the place of its totality-founded on sacrifice-there or here-our immortalities cannot help with this-Churches, States, even Atheisms are given to personifications of totality-exchanging bed linens-you can vote for a water glass of democracy on the side-table-they never apologize for time misspent, not even in the theories of themselves-now and again, they rehabilitate some lives-
Ernst Kantorowicz, Frederick II
Michel Foucault
Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable
I was talking to Galileo the other day about his rehabilitation-he was disdainful-we wondered who or what is speaking in such ethics of thoughtcertainly not time regained, let alone eternalizedwe were standing there in Rome-in the Campo dei fiore-at the foot of Giordano Bruno's monument. He jumped right off his pedestal and said `Listen, kid, it's better to burn.'
`Hell,' I said, astonished, 'I'm 72.'-we three then walked along talking about Bruno's dialogues and sonnets, dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, De gli eroici furori, and of Plato's curious blending of the words Eros and heros-`the name heros is only a slight alteration of Eros from whom the heroes sprang'-of what it was like to write of heroic frenzies-
Cratylus
in canto X of the Inferno, we come upon the open tombs of those who questioned immortalityEpicurus, who argued that happiness is the chief good, `and all his followers'-the last great Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire (the title lasted until t 806), Frederick II (d. t 25o)-of whom it is said that he had a man imprisoned in a sealed wine vat and left him to perish under watch to prove that the soul died with the body, if it could not escapeand among them Guido Cavalcanti's father and father-in-law, so condemned while Guido was still alive, neither of whom had so experimented with human destiny-only Florentines in the midst of religious and political strife, who questioned immortality-the crown of such totality-where in modern terms a fortuneteller paradises-
I think of the friendship and estrangement of Dante and Guido, whom Dante names `the first among my friends' in The New Life, of whom, in Hell, he sends the message to his father that he is still living, who is recalled in the Purgatorio for the glow of his poems-
Purgatorio XI_97
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