writing life, a gain

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For some persons, life becomes text: aural, visual, written.

So it went in the fabulous film, “Anatomy of a Fall” (2023) which is so French in concept: exhibiting a certified copy of an era of a marriage brought into cohering sense through “documentational” art.

The author overcame tragedy through finding narrative enclosure whose deeper, farther, higher implicature remains a mystery for listeners, viewers, readers to prospect: How love of one’s artistic partner betrayed itself.

marks, letters, history

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email to an art exhibit reviewer:

I’m thrilled to see Heidegger remembered as inquirer into art, especially as entrance into your review [of an exhibit of ancient and contemporary ceramics in Malta]….

Heidegger implicitly distinguishes between the Work which eventually results in an artwork and the artwork itself. So, “the work of art” has the artist-at-work (the Work) in mind (“setting forth" toward the artwork). Indeed, the artwork doesn’t “set itself to work” [quoting reviewer] “The truth of an entity” [ibid.] is intentional, which only living “entities” show. (What may be the “truth” of a gloriously-colored bird showing, unwittingly, its evolved excellence?).

mis-addressed postcard

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So, he says, “…I read myself as a narrative character, an authorship, who sometimes seems strange to me, and worthy of sardonic framing or dismissive meta-narrative….,”

O, don’t worry. You just want to imply some self-effacing postmodern plight. That was very well worn decades ago.

“So it goes for the conceptualist mind: a chronic sense of surreality.”

No, you actually love playing philological glyph.

resort

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Everyone wants a good story: to be entranced, to be drawn into immers-
ion, forgetting oneself in being intently releasing attention so fully,
there’s no idea of given way to the appeal because one is the flow of immersion, like flying into a horizon is like the horizon overtaking
one’s unmoving position. “I’m lost to you, so wholly given I forget I
gave way into you I’ve become.”

In an immersive story, “you” (one) become the text narrating itself,
drawing you on as if there’s no you apart from the drawing.

here now the dead

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a little sermon for the grand story

Marjorie Perloff, a notable literary theorist, died Sunday.

The New York Times had a long, substantive obituary ready Monday.

Creepy.

I said to the reviewer, Clay Risen, via email, that his admirable narrative surely required “a bit of scrambling for information,” normal for NYT obituaries. Monolithic sculptor “Richard Serra died yesterday,” I added. “and Roberta Smith got a first version online the same day. It’s as if the obit was largely done before death, waiting in draft. ‘She’s dead. Amend, edit, upload'.”

Next?

Marjorie Perloff is another instance, for me, of a grand person who may have been forgotten years ago, then is brought back to mind by their death—yet,
to be soon forgotten again—which calls for thinking about what lives are generally.