True to Form

Why do people say the things they do? They might say things in order to testify, mislead, fool, excite, amuse, entertain, imply, indicate, conclude, express, ingratiate, train, edify, teach, exalt, redeem, forgive, bless, annoint, direct, advise, aid, inform, reform, cede or grant a point, relinquish, introduce, agree, disparage, describe, insult, deny, decline, accept, narrate, qualify, demand, acknowledge, name, open, bequeath, greet, consecrate, compliment, denigrate, negotiate, explain, expunge, elucidate, humiliate, hurt, disadvantage, exploit, profit, record, encourage, satisfy, please, share, reject, insult, condemn or bid farewell. There might be times when people say things for no reason at all.

Truth is, though, no one ever says anything because it is true.

Shivaree!

"Another time, we went to Mannheim and attended a shivaree -- otherwise an opera --, the one called Lohengrin. The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief. The racking and pitiless pain of it remains stored up in my memory alongside the memory of the time that I had my teeth fixed. There were circumstances which made it necessary for me to stay through the four hours to the end, and I stayed; but the recollection of that long, dragging, relentless season of suffering is indestructible. To have to endure it in silence, and sitting still, made it all the harder. I was in a railed compartment with eight or ten strangers, of the two sexes, and this compelled repression; yet at times the pain was so exquisite that I could hardly keep the tears back." Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad, ch. 9.

Scribbles after Wittgenstein

We must guard against the temptation to use nature to explain anything personal. An itch occurs and, naturally, I scratch it. Do I use the same number of fingers you would? Scratch lightly or vigorously? Do I curse the itch or enjoy it? Do I curse it while secretly or guiltily enjoying it? Do I worry this itch might indicate disease, become infected? Stoics don’t scratch itches; they ignore them. Might not itches be taken as omens of future events? Happy or unhappy ones? Do I rub some icon afterwards, say for good luck? Or rub alcohol on it out of medicinal prudence? (Aren’t these sometimes the same thing?) Might not scratching my own or someone else’s itch be a sort of proposal, part of sexual play? A mingling of atoms sheds no light on any of this.

True, when we manage to trace out the causes of itches, tickles, pains, thoughts, inner voices, dreams, intentions, beliefs, aversions and whatnot, these bits of humanity are explained. And even if such explanations as we currently possess are incomplete, they are at least leading, and often productive (of effective medicines or public policies for example, or of sensible strategies for avoiding injury). But that some natural cause has some natural effect, while potentially useful, is not particularly interesting to me as a student of history, a music listener, a movie goer, a dreamer, a person. I want to know what roles a certain experience plays in people’s lives, to what degree they can alter these roles, and whether or not they should in fact alter them.

What clown studies Newton to improve his juggling technique?

The point is not to denigrate the science of bodies, but to recall that the subjects of such study do not blush with embarrassed pleasure, or wonder whether to turn on the light to see if they’ve been bitten by an insect. While I suppose you to be physically constituted, I nonetheless acknowledge and recognize your humanity. Does the fact that I do both of these things in English, indeed sometimes with the same words, indicate the substantial simplicity of my world, or the complex and flexible character of the language I speak?

It will happen that a doctor treating an illness also treats the patient with respect. How is this possible? It is possible if the same word does different things in different circumstances. But our words imply a world, don't they? How can one world have different natures? Say rather: there are worlds. But only if you have to.

Dream a Little Dream

She puts red paint on the backs of my hands, lumps of it. It starts to run and looks like blood. This makes you one of us.

Cabbages

Of Diocletian: "His answer to Maximian is deservedly celebrated. He was solicited by that restless old man to reassume the reigns of government and the Imperial purple. He rejected the temptation with a smile of pity, calmly observing that, if he could show Maximian the cabbages which he had planted with his own hands at Salona, he should no longer be urged to relinquish the enjoyment of happiness for the pursuit of power." Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. 13.

Manual Dexterity

handpicked, handhold, handstand, handbag, handmaid, handgun, handicap, handle, handlebar, at hand, by hand, on hand, hand on, hands on, in hand, hand in, hand to hand, hand in hand, hand to mouth, my hands are full, my hands are clean, I wash my hands of it, on the other hand, hand off, offhand, take in hand, a laying on of hands, tip my hand, out of my hands, off my hands, hands off!, hands down, handmedown, at first hand, second hand, handicraft, a wave of the hand, the hand of friendship, hands of a surgeon, handshake, handyman, handsome, gladhand, open handed, backhand, hand back, hand over fist, hand in glove, left handed, right hand man, hands up!, handout, all hands, hand over, hand over hand, keep a hand in, handclap, gotta hand it to you, in the palm of my hand, one hand tied behind my back, head in hands, hold hands, join hands, handmade, heavyhanded, no hands!

'Stunt' by Claudia Dey

A graceful, lovely book, it reminds me of things –

whiskey and cigarettes, poker and an old man’s laughter
creosote and tottering on the rail
that sound the future made, the echo
the unread portent that was emptiness
the weight of living water just before the splash
the interpenetration of sound and time and taste and smell and mood
the unremembered
how as long as you don’t reach for it, it’s standing in your shoes
warm hands in a cold cold rain
not forgetting really, but the wisdom of not reaching back
the trick of pretending it’s easy

Variety the Spice of Life

Something is better than nothing, to be sure, and everything is generally out of reach. You don't have to be Everyman in order to be a someone, after all. Everyone is a special someone to somebody sometime, we optimistically think. Yet who could, or would, be everything to anyone? Even an exemplar is said to be something else; the alpha and omega of all (like) things it is not. That was some show, wasn't it?

A sum is, ironically, the totality of several somethings, themselves partial and exclusive. The Latin sum, 'I am', in Descartes' dictum, sums up the perfect partiality of his imagined, conscious something called the self. Let's edit Descartes thus, to admit of some constituent plurality: cogito ergo some. This grounds us; think of the proverbial salt. Life's better this way.

The subject of this sentence is

variation, a stuttering, a trial of errors, rudely spit exuberance, a feast, where qualified, of scattergun subordination ripe with change, a tense refusal to accept polite allusion, certain imprecision, disambiguation come unhinged and, homeless, spatterstrewn with a poet’s force at stubborn, dumb, recalcitrant realities, complexly inarticulate, a verbless gesture of unholy insignificance, performer’s art.

Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied

The baroque vocal music performance technique labelled "one-voice-per-part" is severally lauded and vilified as historical or not. Well recorded, it has the virtue of leaving its parts, its voices, unfermented and thereby individually discernable. The resulting sound has a sheer physical beauty that surely justifies its exercize. The parts are realized as both willful and tactfully conscious of one another, emerging from their grounding harmonic without merging into any single line. This crystalizes the organic character of all successful craft: the whole's constituent voices are both unique and subject to common structure.

Of course the structure is conventional; within it, the field of play available to a voice is limited. But then the interplay of several persons in league is also contingent, limited by interest, language, intransigent physicality. Pursued in good faith, however, sustained and alive with interawareness, social constructions large or small can be as beautiful as they are productive.

With regard to the historical question, well, authenticity is bunk.

Galleryspeak

A ball is tossed in the air, a ship by waves at sea. Ideas are tossed about in exchange or experiment. A letter is tossed off hurriedly, drink tossed back, a salad simply tossed. Frequently though, when we speak of what is tossed we speak of what is thrown away, discarded, by implication rejected as broken, without function or worth. Such a process is manifold: remote and familiar, mechanical and humane, public and private, symbolic and startlingly real. Its end is likewise uncertain. What is tossed might not disappear, but stain, haunt and reassert itself in any number of surprising and predictable ways. It might be witnessed, noted, described, alluded to, remembered, transcribed, relived either as a narrative whole or in self-reflecting shards of a broken mind's eye. It might be regenerated, remapped, reconnected, reused, reformed, resurrected either as an organic whole or in unnameable pieces drawn from the unspeakable body of the old. It might even cycle back towards those earlier, greener tosses, the careless cast or fling, the upward motion of admixture and, potentially, renewal. Who knows?

The Art of Being

I have told myself many times not to do this. At some time, perhaps soon, I will stop, having decided I was wrong to start. Writing is not natural. Speaking is not natural. These are nuanced forms of human interaction, and as such supremely artificial. I act in countless ways nonetheless for pleasure and profit, as we all do; why not then to express what and who I am?

For me to invent, declaim or even merely analyze publicly without a precise and certain context of expectations is to invite despair by demonstrating the craft and materials from which my very self has been created. If words are deeds, as Goethe wrote, and Wittgenstein, who will speak but actors in an endless play? Thus my trepidation.

I will try. Expectations can be built, after all, and even comfortably defined roles must be learned before anyone can take a bow for having played them well.

So much for introductions.