Gelegenheitsdichtung

Juvenilia #2

a beautiful summer grove exploding in a shadowlit chiaroscuro of dewdrops […]

laughing with and laughing at.⸻It’s all laughter to me, baby.

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Illegible world—Just me and the dog (Juvenilia #1)

Number in parentheses = date in any January but our own

Marc Chagall, Illustration for review “Troyer/Courant” (1922)

THE PLANE

What a relief it is to sit here at a desk having coffee, writing this and this and this, which nobody will yet or ever read—Rilke passes through my skull. A harmless bolt of pale radiation. An old Star Trek episode plays in the other room… Technicolor. Nothing sensational. No 𝔎𝔲𝔩𝔱𝔲𝔯𝔨𝔯𝔦𝔱𝔦𝔨 here. Everything subject to the rule of the same eggshell white;

the Plane.

IT PROBABLY DOESN’T MATTER

Some foggy perambulations on the “nature” of terms that appear contradictory but have a sort of “third term” hovering above them. I picture the following:

A / A/B [¬□A=A]¹

PILFERED IMAGES

Driving home in the dark: I am thinking about all of this stupid nonsense about synapses, neurotransmitters, neuroreceptors, “neuroplasticity,” “pathways,” in the brain.

What is interesting is to hear people talk about neuroscience as if it were the most solid foundation upon which to base all of our knowledge about ourselves and others. One will take terms like those mentioned above and imagine something that they must represent. It is not wondered at how much of this is linguistic schema, construction, assumption, scaffolding—poorly wrought metaphor. Ask yourself if this will be the language people use in 400 years.

POORLY wrought! Any image is as good as another in any place and time (here I naturally imagine a beautiful summer grove exploding in a shadowlit chiaroscuro of dewdrops—how romantic, how novel…), so why must we PILFER elements of metaphor from the MEDICAL WORLD and apply them to our lives: our spirit, our form, our being?

(“The Brain is a Book” = “The Brain in a Printing Press” = “The Brain is a Computer” = “The Soul is a Computer” …that which is irreducible in me is like nothing else—. It’s already been reduced infinitely into itself, an almost-nothing that knows… The soul is that which cannot be metaphor-ized but once, because it is what does the metaphor-ing.)

Akira Sakata all week.

HAHAHA

Eckermann. Goethe seemed to use his sense of humor to relieve any social tension he felt in the other person. As someone left his house, if it was a formal or serious occasion, he’d make a joke to them as they left, killing the tension the other person may have felt. Compare this sensibility with Kant and his dinner parties; the regimented sections of conversation throughout the night. What I wouldn’t give to look into such a dining room and hear his Humor Segment of the conversation. I wouldn’t even need to translate the German—everything would be so strange, so unbearably funny… Goethe and Kant; laughing with and laughing at.⸻It’s all laughter to me, baby.

𝔊𝔢𝔩𝔢𝔤𝔢𝔫𝔥𝔢𝔦𝔱𝔰𝔡𝔦𝔠𝔥𝔱𝔲𝔫𝔤

When Goethe talks to Eckermann of 𝔊𝔢𝔩𝔢𝔤𝔢𝔫𝔥𝔢𝔦𝔱𝔰𝔡𝔦𝔠𝔥𝔱𝔲𝔫𝔤, which in my copy of Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann is translated as “occasioned poetry”, it sounds too British. A pinch of something else is missing, which is why Kaufmann’s translation of Goethe’s 𝔊𝔢𝔩𝔢𝔤𝔢𝔫𝔥𝔢𝔦𝔱𝔰𝔡𝔦𝔠𝔥𝔱𝔲𝔫𝔤 is so good: “poetry of circumstances.” Another benefit of this translation is its profitably reversible syntax. Between “poetry” and “circumstances” is a two-way street, both directions of which complete each other. (“Poetry about whatever circumstance” and “poetry inherent in whatever circumstance”; a third one: “circumstanced poetry.”)

The individual works in the invisible guiding hand of the whole.

It is snowing outside. The feeling I had yesterday: it was like I felt the size of my spirit (which does not “exist”—that would be a heresy against my own heresy…) increase. Adequate expression unto myself without all these little fucking clarifications…

{I felt my spirit go big.}

The snow. I remember putting on Schumann’s 𝔖𝔷𝔢𝔫𝔢𝔫 𝔞𝔲𝔰 𝔊𝔬𝔢𝔱𝔥𝔢’𝔰 𝔉𝔞𝔲𝔰𝔱—I put on my fleece, a sweatshirt, my big woolen jacket—heavy, warm, a little impractical—I put food and water in my pack, strap up my winter boots and leave the Ouray Hotel. The hotel lobby is as silent as the whited town, but nowhere as expansive. The edges of town, the mountains and their skies, fade into half-existence with the static blizzard. As I move closer to the mountains between the brick buildings of old mining country, and the details of the storm and trees become clearer, the snow looks less human and more perfect. The thought of my reading, left to wait upstairs in the hotel room: Prospero’s mask is before me. Now I remember Nietzsche, in a letter to his friend, talking excitedly about Offenbach and Beethoven’s 7th Symphony—I trudge up the stony hill already at home in the aural Faust’s study conjured by Schumann.

Extract the motif or admit there is 𝔫𝔬𝔫𝔢.

ON THE SYNTAGMATIC AND PARADIGMATIC AXES

There is a set of terms, probably outdated by now and so more interesting than ever, in structural linguistics that describe two intersecting sets or axes of signification. The syntagmatic, or x-axis, of meaning has to do with the word’s immediate context in the sentence (syntax). The paradigmatic, or y-axis of meaning, is a word’s possible meanings, once it has been lifted out of its context.

The x-axis of actuality rises like the tides, and upon each set of tides the waves, into that invisibility of the y-axis of potentiality—the latter is negated by the surface of the waves and soft oscillations of the syntagm into momentarily existing flashes, black flashes of text.

The y-axis of the paradigm splits off from itself on the cutting edge of the syntagm.

The syntagmatic meaning of a word is related to temporality insofar as it must be understood in a particular context (succession). The paradigmatic meanings of a word are related to temporality only insofar as these simultaneous, kinetic meanings seem to lie outside of it.

What about the meaning of a dream—posited—is syntagmatic and paradigmatic? When one has only just been dreaming is when the dream is interpreted syntactically, i.e., laid out. Laying something out chronologically is already syntagmatic interpretation. The process is all but immediate. (These are the “moral facts” even when all that should exist are a “moral interpretation of facts”.)

You are already awake, moving through the day. The dream becomes more and more an object of contemplation (as in the old monastic orders, that which is contemplated is that which is legible). The further away the dream becomes, the more it embeds itself in waking life, like a splinter working its way through flesh (who can say whether deeper down or further out—that’s a topological question). A splinter that forms in the will and moves through the intellect—it casts its pseudo-linear shadows into every corner of the grid.

But when a dream is experienced only “in the moment,” it is dreamed (𝔚𝔦𝔩𝔩𝔦𝔞𝔪 𝔅𝔩𝔞𝔨𝔢) eternally. Temporality is negated… you are asleep the whole time. Your body is a kind of thing-in-itself huddled around its own representation like a bum hiding his flaring match from the wind…

It is good to have one friend to write “for” who does not read and has no feel or reference as to anything like “quality,” good, bad, whatever. It is also essential that this friend never actually read your stuff—lonely dedications! Such a friend never knows that they are a reliquary; this is called “good manners.”

CAVE DIVER OF THE SPIRIT

A foggy paraphrase of Li Bo: I fall face first into the watery moon. The river rushes over me—I’m drunk!—and the moon above watches. Drunkenly trying to embrace the moon… a failed embrace of reflection is the essence of reflection. Every reflection, every representation, a faltering embrace.

Love. Drunkenness.

Playful obfuscation—even obscurantism—can be a good thing. It reminds us that we can’t have everything. (Not to mention the fact that you can never get what you want: onto-psychologically impossible—except, maybe, in the case of the 𝔲𝔯-choice of Schelling. You either act out in the spirit of that original choice / original act coinciding with your being, or you crawl back to it, you become a cave diver of the spirit.)

1. Don’t worry, it’s probably not important.