confession of a rhizomic writer

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Tracing a rhizome’s strings can be tedious. But for the record,
I netweave for fun.

i love to write

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So, I loved you for writing. Thanks
to you, I wrote my way into awing horizons,
came back to draw you into it all, a musing of course
that made you laugh a lot, inspired to go
your own way.

appellant horizoning

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There being a theme-ic constellation may show
mystery of discernible Meaning to be made of it, as if
reverie, evinced by its appeal, portends generative insight
(creative promise) for there being someday originary inception
from near-term protean aspiration venturing beyond
given literary person-ality, thanks to present appeals
of comparative thinking for the sake of heirs’ better futures.

creating novel wilderness isn’t about tourism

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Creative responsiveness as an artwork done is usually regarded by commentary (or expository criticism) as received, i.e., as an object of reception or appreci-
ation, not as an occasion to understand the backstory of the Work which results as the received work.

So, if you’re interested in creative process (Work to work), you usually depend on autobiographical and biographical narratives, work whose own Work isn’t
a focal theme, apart from brief prefacing in that work.

I want to gain trans-authorial understanding of the Work-to-work venture, i.e., creative process, analogous to well-established interest in creativity as such,
but focused on “literary” creativity.

highly resorting

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Recent years in the U.S. cause me to want “inner emigration.”

I know many minds feel similarly about these times, as if the soul of their genius destined them to commune privately with kindreds within their highlands becoming internetted around the planet.

Cohering nets of creative estate have been around since leisure allowed one
to flourish in happy interplay, historically becoming estated and distributed colonies of high mindfulness, now The University as planetary form of life, altogether a singularity of universCity resorting around global metropolia.

notes going on: textures

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A figurative theme (sprout) presented without explication may be an invitation for thinking together in those terms, as well as being a record of what calls
for future exploration—together?

“Well, at least he’s together with his own path marks for later dwelling.
Thanks for sharing!”

touring resorts

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The wealth of the literary market is too much to take in.

Today, I browsed the new book ads in the “Spring Books” special issue of the New York Review of Books. I’m a subscriber for decades, now having six unwandered back issues.

I’ll catch up now by one a day. (Also, I have six back issues of the London Revew of Books to wander.)

I’m nearly overwhelmed by the diversity of scholarly books which evidently have a market? How can so much specialist non-fiction (and fiction) find enough audience to be feasible for the publishers?

the lover

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When Terese gave me a copy of Duras’s The Lover to read ASAP, we were to soon “discuss” it at a café in the Castro (by her invitation) while her almost-husband Will was out of town (which his job required regularly, and Terese welcomed. They lived across the bay from S.F.: east of Berkeley).

I didn’t tell her I already owned a copy, though I hadn’t read it.

The sexual scenes are appealing, of course. But I flagged pages which were especially about the difficulties of Indochinese life. “You” hear about the sexuality of the book, but it’s really about a teen girl’s witness of colonial poverty exploited by wealthy colonialists.

That was fascinating. That’s what I wanted to praise and discuss: Duras’s writing. Duras was using the sexual story to bait awareness of colonial tragedy.

Time gives gravity to prettiness where beauty emerges

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Airy living, 15 years ago, “soothing W. H. Auden,” about extra-ordinary life.

That page hasn't been public. It was done for a beloved friend, Terese, whose eidetic memory penned Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" perfectly for me during a lunch.

to a literary scholar who felt stalked

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Today, Americans are avoiding what Weimar couldn't prevent, I pray. 

No, praying won't exorcise preyers. We teach. That was Heidegger's "politics," i.e., his extending the emancipatory interest of Being and Time by exempli-
fying critical phenomenology through ways of therapeutic thinking. (Don't mistake critical mirroring for Self expression.)

I thought of you again when recently I read (re-read, I forget) Heidegger's 1949 "Introduction" to "What Is Metaphysics?" He writes that separating one’s sense of being from becoming is invalid (ref.2.10, p. 285). It’s symptomatic of the metaphysicalism which he variably deconstructs in terms of others’ phenomenality.

A feature of metaphysicalist “thinking” is that it destines itself, whereas authentic openness loves to see chances for re-thinking.

Therefore, Heidegger may have let others’ stubborn attachments (and academic vanity) have its way (groupthink)—there being schadenfreude, fer sure—while he continued his own precursory appeal for ones to come.

a hallowing day

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A feature of the Classical mind, as well as Cartesian subject, was intolerance for irreverence. It insults the vanity of the traditional self (the lorded “subject”).

That kind of thought came back to mind today when I was looking at the Britannica article on “Romanticism,” which includes “…a predilection for…the weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic.”

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.

we invent each other here, to some degree

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Jacques Derrida’s 1987 preface to Psyche: Inventions of the Other seems to express an essential aspect of his self-analytical sensibility, which places author and reader in a mirrorplay of discernment and invention, inevitably.

a luscious parody of man abusing nature (and Eves)

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After reading admiring reviews of “Poor Things” in several leading media,
I saw the first showing in Berkeley (in the darling Elmwood district). I loved it!

The surreally comical allegory is a stellar polemic aimed at misogynistic desire to control nature and girl-women. But as cinema, it’s a delight in every mode—a masterly parody of abusive mankind.

looking well at "Never Look Away"

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Hi, Lisa,

I saw ”Never Look Away,” after so many evenings when I wanted to, but couldn't fit 3 hours of viewing into available time. So, I'm glad that the occasion of your essay caused me to make the time. 

I didn't read your discussion of the film (or, rather, that scene) until today, since
I avoid reading about a film that I want to see, before I've seen it.

The film disappointed me, though again I'm glad I saw it. Auteur von Donner-
smarck did a masterful essay, as the film, about art in mid-20th century Germany, though anchored by cardboard characters' changing eras of life relative to box office-sure contexts of struggle and tragedy (as if Germany needs more), done with compelling cinematic expertise. It's great enter-
tainment! Von Donnersmarck did great service to art history. My disap-
pointment is no discredit to the film. (I want psychological depth—insightful plausibility between characters—beyond another proper indictment of satanic nazi minds.)

whose mind am i reading?

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In the beginning, there were no words, but we know now that there was caring: good enough attachment of infant to mother…In the beginning, there was no other, just the caring, so-called “relationality,” primal inter-ing. Everything was interal—unrepresentable interality, what Antonio Damasio, decades ago, called “the feeling of what happens” (though he wasn’t primarily oriented by relating-ness).

Then, one day—or gradually emerging from all nebulosity—there was an other: mother, which is first primal personification.

One, two, three,…infinity: Everything is personified.