February 2012
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He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.
―Carolyn Forché
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“The alphabet has been transformed into electronic impulses on the skin and...”
– Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego
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[language is a virus]
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Adrift in the middling latitudes
“By contrast, I investigate how successful communication systems can emerge without innate or transferable meanings, and show that this is dependent on the agents developing highly synchronized conceptual systems.”
ex abstract, Andrew D. M. Smith, “Intelligent Meaning Creation in a Clumpy World Helps Communication,” in Artificial Life 9 (2003): 175-190
Brings to mind my parable of a castaway...
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Leonardo's Notebooks
Leonardo wrote in his notebooks backwards, from right to left, so that they had to be held up to a mirror to be read.
In a manner of speaking, the image of Leonardo’s notebooks would be more real than the notebooks themselves.
Leonardo was also left-handed. And a vegetarian. And illegitimate.
-David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress
[what is more real, what is legitimate?]
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Un: A Chronicle of Desire
It’s not that it happened, it’s the memory that it could have.
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“There you’ll find the place I love most in the world. The place where I...”
– Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo
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“Every life is a well of loneliness that only grows deeper with the passing...”
– Juan Jose Saer, The Witness
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Dear friend
I write to pour myself out to you and to affirm myself to myself.
I am the prey of great powers that surge forth and then disintegrate…
-Modigliani in a letter to friend Oscar Ghiglia
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“I have a sort of sea-feeling, here in the country, now that the ground is covered with snow. I look out of my window in the morning while I rise as I would out of a port-hole of a ship in the Atlantic. My room seems a ship’s cabin; & at nights when I wake up & hear the wind shrieking, I almost fancy there is too much sail in the house, & I had better go on the roof...
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Dismantling
Although perhaps this distinction is no more than one of semantics.
-David Markson, Wittengenstein’s Mistress
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Nik Kershaw, The Riddle
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“In the thickets of language every creature is wild.”
– Ivan Vladislavić’s “Dictionary Birds”, The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories.
(towirr)
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“I do not remember when it was that I stopped looking.”
– David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress
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As to funeral rites, the earliest age is called the Age of Burning; because all the dead were consumed by fire, and over their ashes were raised standing stones.
-Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, (ca. 1230)
(thriley)
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“And thus I purge myself of a certain nostalgia that cause of which I know too...”
– Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
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Definition: syzygy
syz·y·gy/ˈsizijē/
Noun: A conjunction or opposition, esp. of the moon with the sun.
A pair of connected or corresponding things.
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