the action of lightning

Bataille on the festival:

"The sacred is that prodigious effervescence of life that, for the sake of duration, the order of things holds in check, and this this holding changes into a breaking loose, that is, into violence.

[...]

The divine world is contagious and its contagion is dangerous. In theory, what is started in the operation of sacrifice is like the action of lightning: in theory there is no limit to the conflagration."

In relation to Durkheim on effervescence and the deification of society:

Deification of society (pursues ends beyond the individual), dominion over consciences: moral authority. Worked out in common, intensity of acceptance in individual mind: echoes reciprocally in all other minds. Psychic properties. Collective force not entirely external, integral to our being (made up in and by individual consciences).

“Invigorating influence” of society, especially at certain moments, e.g. August 4th, 1789: debate over feudal rights, “legal form given to the resolution of a principles made in a moment of collective enthusiasm,” later called night of the Dupes, St. Bartholomew’s night massacre of the estates (August Decree).

Refurbishing of common faith by manifesting it in common, *attitude particular to man addressing the crowd…form of grandiloquence absurd elsewhere, effective in context. “Even his ideas lose all sense of proportion and easily fall into every kind of excess.” “Abnormal plethora of forces,” oratorical inspiration: forces derive from the group, rebounded, amplified feeling, reverberation, the group “incarnate and personified.”

"[...] general effervescence characteristic of revolutionary or creative periods."

Forces: each form in our conscience two circles of mental states, two sorts of reality (sacred, profane things).

Early years of French Revolution, under influence of general enthusiasm, things secular transformed by public opinion (The Motherland, Liberty, Reason) become religion established with dogma, holy days, altars, symbols, etc. Patriotic enthusiasm. Collective action: sensation of the sacred.

on intimacy

Or, reading to re-center.

"Intimacy cannot be expressed discursively. The swelling to the bursting point, the malice that breaks out with clenched teeth and weeps; the sinking feeling that doesn't know where it comes from or what it's about; the fear that sings its head off in the dark; the white-eyed pallor, the sweet sadness, the rage and the vomiting...are so many evasions. What is intimate, in the strong sense, is what has the passion of an absence of individuality, the imperceptible sonority of a river, the empty limpidity of the sky: this is still a negative definition, from which the essential is missing."

Bataille, The Theory of Religion (51)

like a revolution

Although Jim Burden and I both live in New York, I do not see much of him there. He is legal counsel for one of the great Western railways and is often away from his office for weeks together. That is one reason why we seldom meet. Another is that I do not like his wife. She is handsome, energetic, executive, but to me she seems unimpressionable and temperamentally incapable of enthusiasm.

from the opening pages of Cather's My Antonia. There is an alternate opening chapter (included as an appendix in an edition that also had a foreward by Kathleen Norris, which I have scouted on Google Books Search but haven't yet been able to look at in depth), where the description of Burden's wife is extended:

"She was a restless, headstrong girl, even then, who liked to astonish her friends. Later, when I knew her, she was always doing something unexpected. She gave one of her town houses for a Suffrage headquarters, produced one of her own plays at the Princess Theater, was arrested for picketing during a garment-makers' strike, etc. I am never able to believe that she has much feeling for the causes to which she lends her name and her fleeting interest. She is handsome, energetic, executive, but to me she seems unimpressionable and temperamentally incapable of enthusiasm."

Perhaps not incidentally, the absence of Burden's wife enables the narrative (her lack of enthusiasm being utterly opposed to the work of narration).

The only other appearance of enthusiasm in My Antonia relates to Mrs. Harling, the domestic revolutionary:

"Her enthusiasm, and her violent likes and dislikes, asserted themselves in all the everyday occupations of life. Wash-day was interesting, never dreary, at the Harlings'. Preserving time was a prolonged festival, and house-cleaning was like a revolution."

Next up: Wharton's The House of Mirth

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?