Interviews and essays
Happiness
2308
A bit difficult one.
Anyway, “happiness” in the language of this place is an obscure and unpronounceable word, which someone had described to her as a shape that walks behind you, stepping forward every so often to fill your contour.
Love is strange. Each time the man hides something from his wife, Pearl’s power grows. First the necklace, then the second chair.
About Spring
Maybe raiders will come. It is almost spring. Raiders always come in spring, when the ice changes and the water on the bay begins to move its vast killer skin. Maybe raiders will come. It is almost spring. Raiders always come in spring, when the ice changes and the water on the bay begins to move its vast killer skin.
Wrong Norma
A good review on Carson’s new book Wrong Norma. 2402
A Lecture on Corners
Memory can edit reality in some such way, and then the edited version is too good to let go. Memory makes what it needs to make.
Corners are what make a grid different than a line, a plaid shirt different
than a striped one, a soccer pitch different than a field, an elbow different than an arm, light as a wave different than light as a particle.Corners make personalities out of persons, maps out of surveillance, and a healthy brain into a demented one.
A third character usually silent
Each of his (Sophecles) plays presents harrowing triangular situations where two characters bring pressure to bear on a third who is trapped between them and cracks open, or two knowledges that collide together to force out a third that nobody wants to see.
Silence is a big, crude, theatrical substance.
To be withdrawn into one’s corner can be a situation of personal peace
Demented people do not seem to experience the self as a shelter. There is some basic animal certainty that you are who you are and it’s okay that is deleted from them. No more dialectic of inside and outside.
You are simply exposed. You are open to all the winds. Your life is taking place in that space that the ancient Greek philosophers called to apeiron, the unbounded, which was synonymous with chaos for Hesiod.
I’m pretty sure Emily Bronte and Shakespeare and the Greek philosophers would chart a course for the unbounded by going out, not in. But when the unboundedness comes after you, when you can’t escape it outwardly because it is already inside and already burning, then you really have no shelter.
This is a question commonly asked by the last character left alive at the end of a Greek tragedy. Now where can I go?Most extant Greek tragedies have substantially the same set. The action takes place in and out of a house as human tragedies take place in and out of a mind.
“Our house is our corner of the world,” Bachelard says. The house of Greek tragedy though is also a kind of riddle. With its dialectic of inside and outside, the house is a container holding an answer to some question that is posed on the space of the stage. The aim of the play’s action is to bring the inside out to expose what lies hidden in the house, some knowledge contained there.
When the house speaks, it will ruin the people inside. We look forward to that ruination from the time we take our seats at the start of the play.
The explosion of knowledge, if there is one, happens inside the audience. The dialectic of outside and inside has been reabsorbed by the play as an atmosphere of menace pervading banal conversation
and light gestures. There are questions and answers everywhere, but they don’t fit together.Pinter plays generally take place in a house. Each character starts out in their little corner of the world, however ruined, psychotic, or hopeless….Waiting for Godot offers no state. Here is no inside or outside,no structure that might open up to reveal something else.
An empty stage with white plaster tree gives just enough curve to the earth, just enough boundary to the unbounded to suggest the beginning of real terror. The unbounded, in Greek, apeiron, a word formed by adding the negative prefix alpha to the noun peirar, which is thought to mean rope end. Unboundedness is a rope not tied off at the end to prevent its unraveling.
And in Aristotle’s account, the unbounded is abhorrent because it is nothing but beginning.
You don’t have to hit the ground to experience cornerless space.
“For the last six years,”he goes back and forth “from morning ‘til evening in his room, “murmuring to himself. “At night, he gets up and walks about the house or sometimes stops to blacken any piece of paper he finds by covering it with words. At the stairs, we had a final glimpse of him, striding in his room, pressing on.”
Holderlin not only denies confinement by going for walks inside his room, he cancels the conventional
corners of legibility, blackening any piece of paper he finds by covering it with words. It is a different kind of restlessness, crowding the paper with words all the way to the edge so there’s no difference
between text and margin.“Language,” he said in a late fragment,”is the most dangerous of good things.”
I wonder if the danger he feared has to do with control. Too little control, too much control, or just the very, very, very intoxicating idea of control itself.
Whether his apeiron, his unbounded, should be interpreted as spatially or temporally without limits, or perhaps as that which has no qualifications, or as that which is unable to be exhausted remains controversial.
What comes through is that he saw the cosmos as a kind of contest between the bounded and the unbounded. But then again, who doesn’t?
ganzfeld. 全知感应
At the same time, it might be said there’s nothing more egoistic than feeling or arranging to feel egoless.
Take the corners out, put the corners back in.
Whence things have their coming into being, so they have their passing away, for they give justice and
recompense to one another for their injustice according to the ordinance of time.
Things Fall Together A 2000 interview
Linnaeus Town A poem. 231102
SHORT CONVERSATIONS WITH POETS about Nox, how it was created. The very last sentence caught my eye. 231206
We used to tell people to take it to a second-floor window and drop it—the folds are quite strong and the pages make a wonderful fluttering sound as they unfurl.
A year ago I read Nox in Klask Center. Not too long ago I spotted it in a local bookstore at Society Hill.
No You May Not Write about Me A paragraph. 230504
Poor Houdini FictionInteresting fiction. Genius language as usual. 240122
Life A poem 210628