fragilekeys

Larval Subjects has given my recent inquiries the honor of a response. What follows is mine. I’ll say in advance how appreciative I am for whatever reading transpires here between us. I would apologize in advance for how disheveled it is, if only I could have imagined a different way. I feel stripped of options– not cornered, as if there were no where else to go, but as on an open plain, where any direction taken amounts to the same thing: wandering by chance, but discovering. In the end, I desired nothing but this open plain– where there was no reason to prevent the wildfires and the draughts.

Initially, I should admit to having no “position” of my own. This is either a luxury or a failure, depending on how you look at it; but it is the only “position” that could jive with my experience, which was like a rug being continually pulled out from under “me,” i.e., whoever thought he was sitting on it. A view that I express in opposition or in accord is merely a function of where I find myself in the open field, in line with the passions that the conversation between the wildflowers inspires. In the end, I agree with everything, because it is the participation in spring that matters first and foremost. Continue reading →

This post is a response to an article posted over at Indecidibles titled The Room of the Poet. The basic question posed there is this: how is one “confined” to the intense stream of thoughts and emotions within themselves (in their “private room” or “consciousness”) to express themselves in the language of the marketplace, on the plane of the everyday? NMMP writes, “The interior man is condemned to silence —or at least to an empty language that fails at communicating the true nature of his experience.” And yet obviously, this can be shared. NMMP shares it, and so do the authors he studies, through writing. I would like to explore in this post what happens to that “interior man” once he sets to writing. NMMP has indicated the direction I’d like to take, first by alluding to Bataille, but also in his final paragraphs, where he writes:

Writing, as an act of the mind, is private and interior —but, as an act of language, communication and exteriority are inscribed in its very essence. One is safe in assuming that Malte does most of his writing in his room —“Now I am sitting in my room, I can try to reflect calmly on what has happened” — and yet his writing is full of vivid descriptions of cityscapes and city people. When writing, Malte is at the same time in his room and out in the world. He has achieved what Baudelaire termed “incomparable privilege of the poet,” the ability to be, at will “himself and an other.” That privilege, of course, is nothing else than the ability to be interior —that is, an individual— and exterior at the same time. Continue reading →

To affirm the priority of “making fresh starts” and “wiping the slate clean qua self-understanding” is to reaffirm the power of renewing our potentials, accepting what was unknown to us, and of engaging our dreams. But the question was then once again raised: why wipe the slate clean? Is it possible? A petite exposée on forgetting is what followed.

Forgetting is not to obliterate what’s forgotten, nor is it to “forget it” in the traditional sense. Rather, to “forget,” as I am trying to think it, is simply to “re-lease”: to trust what transpires as we “forget our place.” It’s also to allow what’s forgotten to be remain that way and to trust that if it’s important, it will return. No thought is worth “chasing.” To allow whatever “is” to withdraw, to not grasp at what “was,” this is the forgetting I endorse, because it brings us profoundly back, again and again back, to what is. And, as the tautology would go, what is is all that there is. Continue reading →