on beginnings

"But if I hadn't done, on solicitation, this particular thing I shouldn't have begun ever at all; and if I hadn't begun I shouldn't have the set purpose to show, henceforth, what flower of perfection I presume to think I can pick from the dusty brambles--ah meagre vegetation!--of the dramatic form."

To Robert Louis Stevenson. 34 De Vere Gardens W. Oct. 30th, 1891.

The letter begins, "My dear Louis. My silences are hideous, but somehow I feel as if you were inaccessible to sound."

English National Opera production of The Turn of the Screw, December 2007

wish list

Kurt Tong, Gosling Lake

via 20 x 200

JK Photography, Underwater Silence 7x10

via etsy.com

richard long

A Line Made by Walking (1967)

"The consolation, the dignity, the joy of life are that discouragements and lapses, depressions and darknesses come to one only as one stands without--I mean without the luminous paradise of art. As soon as I really re-enter it--crossed the loved threshold--stand in the high chamber, and the gardens divine--the whole realm widens out again before me and around me--the air of life fills my lungs--the light of achievement flushes over all the place, and I believe, I see, I do."

The Notebooks of Henry James. October 22nd, 1891, 34 De Vere Gdns.

synapses

Kiki Smith, Nests and Trees (1997)

Sigmund Freud, "On the spinal ganglia and spinal cord of petromyzon" (c. 1900)

on convergence

Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London, 2005)

p. 16, n. 3:

"Once more my reflection dovetails with the work of William Connolly, who--in Identity/Difference (Ithaca, 1991) and The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis, 1995)--argues for a 'politics of paradox'. While we put the accent on different aspects, since Connolly is particularly interested in bringing to the fore what he calls the 'paradox of difference' and I am specially concerned with the paradox of liberal democracy, our approaches converge on many important points. We both consider that it is vital for a pluralist democratic politics to expose and acknowledge paradoxes instead of trying to conceal or transcend them through appeals to rationality or community."

c.f. Connolly's anti-rationalist stance in Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minnesota, 2000), and particularly the "visceral register," relevant here to Mouffe's agonistic pluralism.

spectral

Special thanks to the OED, always.

spectral, a.

Isaac Taylor (attr.), A Natural History of Enthusiasm (1830)

"A spectral resemblance of piety, unsubstantial and cold as the mists of night."

deleuze and delirium

Gilles Deleuze, "Literature and Life," Essays Critical and Clinical (1997).

on the minor (c.f. Melville's Pip, Father Mapple):

"This is the becoming of the writer. Kafka (for central Europe) and Melville (for America) present literature as the collective enunciation of a minor people, or of all minor peoples, who find their expression only in and through the writer." (4)

on delirium (c.f. Durkheim, the delirium of collective representation):

"Literature is delirium, but delirium is not a father-mother affair: there is no delirium that does not pass through peoples, races, and tribes, and that does not haunt universal history. All delirium is world-historical, a 'displacement of races and continents.' Literature is delirium, and as such its destiny is played out between the two poles of delirium. Delirium is a disease, the disease par excellence, whenever it erects a race it claims is pure and dominant." (4)

on syntax (c.f. William James):

"There are no straight lines, neither in things nor in language. Syntax is the set of necessary detours that are created in each case to reveal the life in things." (2)

Syntax, experience and revelation; bosh! and "finally, breath-words, the a-syntactical limit toward which all language tends." ..."suspended exclamations as the limit of language, as explosive visions and sonorities." (5)