the creative mind

"According to James, we bathe in an atmosphere traversed of great spiritual currents. If many of us resist others allow themselves to be carried along. And there are certain souls which open wide to the beneficent breeze. Those are the mystical souls. We know with what sympathy James studied them. When his book Religious Experience appeared, many saw in it only a series of vivid descriptions and very penetrating analyses--a psychology, they said, of religious feeling. This was a complete misinterpretation of the author's thought. The truth is that James leaned out upon the mystic soul as, on a spring, we lean out to feel the caress of the breeze on our cheek, or as, at the sea-side, we watch the coming and going of sail-boats to know how the wind blows. Souls filled with religious enthusiasm are truly uplifted and carried away: why could they not enable us to experience directly, as in a scientific experiment, this uplifting and exalting force? That is no doubt the origin, the inspiring idea of the 'pragmatism' of William James. For him those truths it is most important for us to know, are truths which have been felt and experienced before being thought."

Henri Bergson, "The Pragmatism of William James," An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903)

on metaphor and metamorphosis

"To put it differently, the word « water » not only represents the encounter of the “Earthwoman” saint with her heaven, but in the state of prayer, Teresa immerses herself above the barrier of word-signs in the psyche-soma. It’s through her fiction ( better and differently than with her epilepsy) that she escapes the “powers” (understanding, memory, imagination). Thus, that which remains « words » is no longer a « signifier-signified » separated from « referent- things », as is customary with « words- signs » in an exterior reality. On the contrary, prayer, which amalgamates the ego and the Other, also amalgamates the word and the thing: the speaking subject undergoes, or nearly undergoes a catastrophic mutism, the self « loses itself », «liquefies », « becomes delirious ». Half way between these two extremes, a thin membrane rather than a bar separates the word from the thing: they contaminate each other and alternately dissociate. The self loses itself and finds itself again, devastated and jubilant, between two waters. Collapse on one side, rapture on the other : the fluidity of the aquatic touch accurately translates this alternation."

Julia Kristeva, "The Passion According to Teresa of Avila"

Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1652)

current events

from Henry James, The Scenic Art; Notes on Acting & the Drama (1872-1901), ed. Allan Wade (New Brunswick, 1948)

"The Théâtre Français has had the good fortune to be able to allow its traditions to accumulate. They have been preserved, transmitted, respected, cherished, until at last they form the very atmosphere, the vital air, of the establishment. A stranger feels their superior influence the first time he sees the great curtain go up; he feels that he is in a theater that is not as other theaters are. It is not only better, it is different. It has a peculiar perfection--something consecrated, historical, academic. This impression is delicious, and he watches the performance in a sort of tranquil ecstasy. [...] He has heard all his life of attention to detail, and now, for the first time, he sees something that deserves that name."

"The Théâtre Français" (1876)

"It is enough to be sorely puzzled, and have carried away a considerable store of tough problems, to be solved at leisure. One of those, for instance, will be connected, as we may surmise, with the extraordinary vogue of Mademoiselle Sarah Bernhardt, and will concern itself with enquiring into the sources of tender interest excited by this lady. I speak of her 'vogue' for want of a better word; it would require some ingenuity to give an idea of the intensity, the ecstasy, the insanity as some people would say, of curiosity and enthusiasm provoked by Mlle. Bernhardt. I spoke just now of topics, and what they were worth in the London system. This remarkable actress has filled this function with a completeness that leaves nothing to be desired [...]."

"The Comédie Française in London" (1879)

c.f. Jennifer Fleissner on the fad; here Bernhardt is the "vogue," filling her function to the end point of desire, using up the movement of curiosity and enthusiasm which is the movement of (cultural) history, the construction of "currency" (the temporality of the "current event," the movement of currency, and the tidal motion of currents all apply here).

corporeality

"In The Bostonians, the analysis of women and publicity describes a broader dilemma: the more rationalized the analysis of human lives, the more uncertain the question of human agency--but also the more compelling the figure of woman as a representative of modern subjectivity. Among its other critical insights, the distinctly cerebral brand of literary analysis undertaken in realism discovers the power of a corporeal figure--the public woman--that is no longer explicable as merely an unreal spectacle."

Nancy Bentley, Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870-1920 (Philadelphia, 2009).

Sarah Bernhardt as Theodora in Victorien Sardou's Theodora (1882).

see Jennifer Fleissner on woman as the 'emblematic' subject of naturalism. representations of modern political subjectivity?

on gesture

Brian Rotman, Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being (Durham, 2008):

"We listen, it seems, not to speech sounds as such, not, that is, as isolatable sonic entities, but to the movements of the body causing them; we focus on what happens between the sounds, to the dynamics of their preparatory phases, pauses, holds, accelerations, fallings away, and completions--the very features of gestures we attend when we are perceiving them." (23)

"In other words, gesture is outside the domain of the sign insofar as signs are coded and call for a hermeneutics, an interpretive apparatus separable from, and in place prior to, the act of signification. Rather, the mode of action of gesture is enactive, exterior to anything prior to its own performance: it works through bodily executed events, creating meaning and mathematical significance 'before one knows it.'" (36)

This last bit is of particular relevance for my own (meagre) efforts, my circling around what it might mean to read gesture into literature, and particularly the repetitive tick that seems to mark the body's presence in the very moment of its (literary) translation into a (disembodied) sign. Rotman resists Agamben's assimilation of gesture to silence, to aphasia, to memory loss: a crucial contribution in trying to think the history (the re-membering) of gesture.

Here my critical interest in gesture runs into a deeply personal, unexplained attachment to ASL:

This, too, is on my wish list.

button pressers

On the relationship between enthusiasm and the fad:

"Photography as a fad is well-nigh on its last legs, thanks principally to the bicycle craze. Those seriously interested in its advancement do not look upon this state of affairs as a misfortune, but as a disguised blessing, inasmuch as photography had been classed as a sport by nearly all of those who deserted its ranks and fled to the present idol, the bicycle. The only persons who seem to look upon this turn of affairs as entirely unwelcome are those engaged in manufacturing and selling photographic goods. It was, undoubtedly, due to the hand camera that photography became so generally popular a few years ago. Every Tom, Dick and Harry could, without trouble, learn how to get something or other on a sensitive plate, and this is what the public wanted-no work and lots of fun. Thanks to the efforts of these persons hand camera and bad work became synonymous. The climax was reached when an enterprising firm flooded the market with a very ingenious hand camera and the announcement, 'You press the button, and we do the rest.' This was the beginning of the 'photographing-by-the-yard' era, and the ranks of enthusiastic Button Pressers were enlarged to enormous dimensions. The hand camera ruled supreme."

Alfred Stieglitz, "The Hand Camera--Its Present Importance" (1897)

"The fad is that embodiment of historicity that most pressures the self-determining individual, producing instead a subject that is fully public and fully historical. What I mean is simply this: if we ascribe someone's interests or actions to a fad for that activity, we imply that those actions derive purely from inhabiting a particular moment in time. That moment was 'the time when everyone was doing x'; we might indeed say that any given moment becomes legible as a moment through the category of the fad. This is not to suggest, however, that the fad's relation to the writing of history is a straightforward one. In fact, I claim the opposite, that the fad often operates as the limit of historical knowledge."

Jennifer Fleissner, Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism (Chicago, 2004).

[note how the commercialization of photography archives the landscape, and particular the female artist/author, as residual forms]

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