books I'm taking

to Los Angeles:

George Santayana, The Birth of Reason and Other Essays.
Henry James, The Bostonians (this is taking me way too long).
Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition.
William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Origin of Language.

susan howe

Poetry you may do the
map of Hell softly one
voice with viol in green
habit or consort twelve

Maniacs and Fantastics
in measured epic dactyl
Far back thinner coranto
one Labadist one Cynic.

Susan Howe, Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007)

currently

Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (University of California Press, 2005).

Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Houghton Mifflin, 2006).

Timothy Clark, The Theory of Inspiration (Manchester University Press, 2000).

Henry James, The Bostonians (1886).

(more).

"Velocity, mechanics, heat, thermodynamics, light, chaos of formulae, electromagnetic induction must be called back into the Sublime, found and forgotten. Dickinson was expert in standing in corners, expert in secret listening and silent understanding. Bristling with Yankee energy, chained to an increasingly demanding agoraphobia, she moved through that particular mole of nature in her--she studied Terror. Adopted parataxis and rupture to tell the feverish haste, the loss, to warn of storm approaching--Brute force, mechanism. Cassandra was a woman. All power, including the power of love, including the nature of Time, is utterly unstable." (Howe, 116)

"Poetry is the great stimulation of life. Poetry leads past possession of self to transfiguration beyond gender. Poetry is redemption from pessimism. Poetry is affirmation in negation, ammunition in the yellow eye of a gun than an allegorical pilgrim will shoot straight into the quiet of Night's frame." (138)

Susan Howe & Joan Richardson on the work of writing as encoding the precedent and the Other, DNA and ventriloquizing, genetic code and inspired vocalization. But: poetry beyond gender?

my susan

Ammunition from Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson (New Directions, 2007):

"My and me. In this unsettling New England lexical landscape nothing is sure. In a shorter space (woman's quick voice) Dickinson went further than Browning, coding and erasing--deciphering the idea of herself, dissimulation in revelation. Really alone at a real frontier, dwelling in Possibility was what she had brilliantly learned to do." (76)

"Inside the highly formalized rhetoric of Poetry's reason, stalks unreason of perverted sexuality." (90)

"What light smiles in this unsurveyed valley of great memory? Materialistic light from the man-made Gun's forged yellow barrel merely mincing Nature's pure Idea of light as power, as fire mimics the sun? What revelation waiting to be born must be shot violently into leering flame? Now all aspects of the poet's self are homeless. Mistress of suspicion, what is there, who? Simpering smile of layer on layer. Who or what smiler? The Vesuvian face, a mask, veils fire, chaos, original will, vapor. Will that is searing lava and sulfurous power." (100)

(Toward a reading of gender and the volcanic: Alcott/Jo March's linguistic eruptions, the ground trembling under the domicile; Yezierska, immigrant conversion and overflow)

declensions

“Pip’s ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Widsom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his god.” (321-322)

"'I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.'
'Upon my soul, he's been studying Murray's Grammar! Improving his mind, poor fellow! But what's that he says now--hist!'
'I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.'
'Why, he's getting it by heart--hist! again.'
'I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.'
'Well, that's funny.'
'And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats; and I'm a crow, especially when I stand a'top of this pine tree here. Caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! Ain't I a crow? And where's the scare crow? There he stands; two bones stuck into a pair of old trowsers, and two more poked into the sleeves of an old jacket." (335)

Melville, Moby-Dick

one day ticket

summer find: Ottawa Chautauqua, one day ticket, June 21, 1898

simmering

"The character and duration of this enthusiasm varies with the state of the individual, from an ecstasy and trance and prophetic inspiration--to the faintest glow of virtuous emotion, in which form it warms, like our household fires, all the families and associations of men, and makes society possible...Everywhere the history of religion betrays a tendency to enthusiasm."
Emerson, "The Over-Soul"

"I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil."
Whitman

"'I sees! O Jesus! I sees!' and still another, without words, like bubbles rising in water."
Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

Compare all, especially this last, to Durkheim's sense of "collective effervescence," the force of excitation as a social fact.

jules bastien-lepage (1848-1884)

Joan of Arc, 1879
Jules Bastien-Lepage (French, 1848–1884)
Oil on canvas; 100 x 110 in. (254 x 279.4 cm)
Gift of Erwin Davis, 1889 (89.21.1)

foucault's madness part two

(of many):

"...at a deeper level, we find a rigorous organization dependent on the faultless armature of a discourse. This discourse, in its logic, commands the firmest belief in itself, it advances by judgments and reasonings which connect together; it is a kind of reason in action. In short, under the chaotic and manifest delirium reigns the order of a secret delirium. In this second delirium, which is, in a sense, pure reason, reason delivered of all the external tinsel of dementia, is located the paradoxical truth of madness."

Foucault, Madness and Civilization

Connection: to Derrida's sense, in "Faith and Knowledge: Two Sources of Religion at the Limits of Reason Alone," of the inevitable proximity (the link) between fundamentalist and hypercritical thought. And with due caution to the distinction between religion and madness, as well as due attention to their shared discursive borders, see also Timothy Clark (on representing enthusiasm): “Ideas that sound a little like accounts of aporias in deconstructive thinking merge in bizarre ways with notions that rest on a religious or magical world view" (from The Theory of Inspiration).

foucault's madness part one

"Madness has ceased to be--at the limits of the world, of man and death--an eschatalogical figure; the darkness has dispersed on which the eyes of madness were fixed and out of which the forms of the impossible were born. Oblivion falls upon the world navigated by the free slaves of the Ship of Fools. Madness will no longer proceed from a point within the world to a point beyond, on its strange voyage; it will never again be that fugitive and absolute limit. Behold it moored now, made fast among things and men. Retained and maintained. No longer a ship but a hospital."

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization

to do

To do: the limits of regionalism. outer bounds. politics of the periphery.

To imagine: the work of sound.

irony and ecstasy

"The anti-rhetoric of Hawthorne, which defends him against sentimentality, also prevents him from rendering sensuality, dissolving all ecstasies in ironies."

Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960)

Ecstasy as sediment, reserve, reaction; ecstasy as experience, unmoored.