I think it is clear that the relation of poetry to truth, which is a question of domain, not of medium, haunts all great Romantic art, which had rejected the more modest role of existing “to divert and to amuse.” Poets like Wordsworth launched a powerful claim to truth through a complicated poetic argument that adjusted mind to nature in the medium of the image, while poets like Keats split “truth” from “value” and lined up poetry on the side of “value,” giving this new domain of truthless value the name Imagination.
Lu
“Prose” is the name for a kind of notational style. It’s a way of making language look responsible. You’ve got justified margins, capital letters to begin graphemic strings which, when they are concluded by periods, are called sentences, indented sentences that mark off blocks of sentences that you call paragraphs. This notational apparatus is intended to add probity to that wildly irresponsible, occasionally illuminating and usually playful system called language. Novels may be written in “prose;” but in the beginning no books were written in prose, they were printed in prose, because “prose” conveys an illusion of a commonsensical logical order. It’s as appropriate to the novel as ketchup to a hamburger, which is to say, it’s not very good but the hamburger wouldn’t go far without it.
Probably this is one of the main reasons that 60s modernism dispensed with all notions of “composition, ” because of the deadly way in which “arrangement ” smothers any interest in the presented object in favor of a banal pleasure based on recurrence phenomena or else treats it to the red carpet presentation of a “little king.”
They reasoned quite correctly that if there are pieces there is arrangement, and all arrangements, no matter how “random,” are apprehended as some kind of order, because randomness is conceivable but not perceivable. Personally I share this distaste for ideas of arrangement and I don’t think anyone can be very interested in doing collage work now, mainly because of the predictability of its effect.
there are stories without narratives in every newspaper in the country a hurricane swung inland and hit the coast of florida once there was a peaceful town called tallahassee and now its in ruins […] and as i see it a story is all about plot a story is the representation of a series of events and parts of events that result in a significant transformation its a logical form but a narrative is a representation of the confrontation of somebody who wants something with the threat and or promise of a transformation that he or she struggles to bring about or prevent or both these are two different cognitive modalities addressed to the problems posed to us by time because time is measured by change destabilizes all things especially human things temporary steady state systems who like to and change because we are all have to think of ourselves as stable in order to imagine ourselves as selves at all
David Antin, I never knew what time it was
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« the noise of time »
i never knew what time it was
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p. 69–70
about two years ago elly and i decided we needed a new mattress or maybe elly decided it because i didnt pay much attention to the problem we had an old mattress wed had it for years and the salesman wed bought it from had assured us it would last us a lifetime and it was getting older and lumpy or lumpy in some places and hollowed out in others and i just assumed it was part of a normal process of aging it was getting older we were getting older and wed get used to it but eleanor has a bad back and she was getting desperate to get rid of this mattress loyally that had lived with us for such a long time and so that i thought i knew all its high points and low points its eminences and pitfalls and i was sure that at night my body worked its way carefully around the lumps dodging the precipices and moving to solider ground whenever it could
but maybe eleanor sleeps more heavily than i do i have a feeling that i spent much of my life at night avoiding the pitfalls of this mattress that i was used to and it was a skill id acquired over the ten or fifteen years of this mattress’ life so i felt there was no reason to get rid of this mattress that had been promised to us by a salesman who said it would last the rest of our lives i figured we were going to live long lives i didnt think we were anywhere close to dying so neither was the mattress but eleanor kept waking up with backaches
still i figured it was a good mattress and that elly just didnt have enough skill at avoiding the lumps mattress was at fault it never occurred to me that the so i didnt do anything and elly didnt do anything because shes not into consumer products and hates to go shopping but by the end of a year elly convinced me because she has a sensitive back and i dont that she had a more accurate understanding of this business than i did so i said sure eleanor lets get a new mattress were rebuilding the house as long as were going to have a new house we may as well have a new mattress but eleanor said how will i know its a good one i dont want to get another mattress that gets hollowed and lumpy and gives me backaches when i wake up how will i know how to get a good one
i said well open the yellow pages and well look up mattresses and therell be several places that sell them point a finger at one of these places and ill close my eyes and and it will be a place that has lots of mattresses where we can make a choice as to what constitutes a good one by lying on them
now elly really knew that you cant just walk into a place and buy a mattress she knows this about american consumer goods and she knows that these places would be equipped with rich delusional capabilities whatever they might be
we would go to a great warehouse with subdued lighting where they played somniferous music that encouraged you into restful comfort while people would be heard talking in hushed voices walking about examining the mattresses or testing them by gently reclining on them “oh are you buying that one my aunt sylvie had one just like it and practically lived on it”
“thats a wonderful mattress my uncle everett suffered for years from lumbago that never let him sleep and slept like a baby ever since” she knows that these places would be equipped with rich delusional he bought that mattress “my aunt agnes had asthma and she used to wake up every hour gasping for breath sleeping on that mattress she sleeps like a log since shes been she rises fresh every morning and plays three sets of tennis every afternoon and shes seventy-three”
[…]we drive out to the one on miramar and its in one of those little malls with a vietnamese restaurant a shoe store and an aerobic studio for women and theres a big empty looking storefront that says THE MATTRESS WAREHOUSE its encouraging i say theres a big truck outside filled with mattresses elly says yes but the place looks as blank as a tire store it doesnt look very impressive i said well the mattresses are all lying down on the floor and youre looking in the window
so i get her into the store and we start looking around trying to figure out where to start and there is a helpful little man an elderly irishman with freckles and gray hair and very laid back and he wants to know if he can help us
can you tell me where the better mattresses are asks eleanor
it all depends on what you want my dear
i want something eleanor says thats firm but comfortable
no i said eleanor you want it to be more than firm every time you talk to me about a mattress you want it to be hard because youre afraid youll sink into it
but what if its the wrong one she said well get used to it i said but seriously she said what if its the wrong one ? i said what would be the right one ? eleanor forget it it doesnt matter you know what luther said when he was confronted by the disciple who wanted to know what to do if he wasnt sure whether or not he was in a state of grace ? he said “sin bravely” i said dammit we dont know if we got the right mattress we dont know if we got the right mixmaster we dont know if we got the right anything theres no way to know let us live cheerfully in our ignorance and we went home
[…]so now were sleeping on the great mattress that eleanor selected so carefully for us and she still has back troubles but theyre not as bad as the ones she used to have so either this is the best possible mattress for her and for us or not and this is the situation that i think best describes our postmodern condition i believe in taking descartes’ advice if youre lost in a forest and you have no idea which way to go with respect to which go for it straight ahead its not likely to be any worse than anything else
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« the theory and practice of post-modernism »
i never knew what time it was
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p. 1–10
now lets take a pair of words like « generous » and « thrifty » say we could probably find an axis that ran through them unfortunately we could find many more than one axis but lets take an axis an axis is a good word it suggests so much a kind of space through with it runs a kind of semantic globe domain ? hyperspace ? anyway lets call it an axis […] but what could that mean that a word could lie closer to the same axis than another it could mean that we will have to find only pure opposites or antonyms lying at ends of feature axes and that all the words in the system will have to be plotted by the intersection of various axes their spatial coordinates in some kind of hyperspace so that we know just how far off the axis of « closed » and « open » « generous » and « thrifty » may really be and how close they lie to an axis of « big » and « small » for example or « soft » and « hard » how many features will we need to map any lexeme how many features are there is there a feature axis that can be constructed by drawing a line between any two words that can be regarded as opposites seen from some point of view will we have to connect every word with every other word in practice in principle dollars and doughnuts if not will there be a finite set of such contrasts ? […] now the reason i chose to talk about tuning i was proposing a way of looking at how we understand things how we come to understand things come to an understanding with each other about things through language has something to do with a notion process i would like to call tuning
clichés are the commonplaces by which we begin a discourse there is no way to put down cliché in the beginning because if there was nothing in common in the utterances with which we addressed each other thered be no way that we could understand what we were saying in some sense there is no adequate theory of how we understand what we say to each other one of the most depressing things about the present attempts at knowledge is the array of formal machines we have for explaining how we know what we say and how poorly they explain it
Bloc de sensations, c’est-à-dire un composé de percepts et d’affects.
Le but de l’art, avec les moyens du matériau, c’est d’arracher le percept aux perceptions d’objet et aux états d’un sujet percevant, d’arracher l’affect aux affections comme passage d’un état de l’un à l’autre.
À chaque fois il faut le style – la syntaxe d’un écrivain, les modes et rythmes d’un musicien, les traits et les couleurs d’un peintre – pour s’élever des perceptions vécus au percept, des affections vécues à l’affect.