"She gladly took the hand, rough, sand, silt, adhesion. The eyes sliced through her and she could feel not only her baby but her conception, an act of love gone to ecstasy--high unencumbered thrill and mortallic epiphany that let the two forget who they were and how 'good' they were supposed to be. She screamed, and only then did a passer-by slow--but so they could curse the scene and broil the couple under complaint, and the assignation of the defiled (for now the future mother was seen as compliant in this vagabonded lifestyle--if you could call it life, and we do). The eucalyptus knew this scream, bending and braying, their oils liquid and vapor by turn of combustion, wind almost snapping the thread from the straw, ice breaking down the deep center of a fjord.
To save what's in you is an eternal thing, the snow that makes a deal with the flame, the skin thick enough to hold a place for the soft."
I returned to this section of Che again today, gray day--softness of what seems a stagnant fog occupying the full head of what we know is, under there, rock and mountain. p. 130, Che.
Word travels if you encourage it. http://www.blazevox.org/bk-pm.htm
Showing posts with label How to buy Che the novella. Show all posts
Showing posts with label How to buy Che the novella. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Message in the Bottle: Analogy of Tides, Traps, Teasing -- And This Poetic, the flight & song of being (the contexts of text, ontology of word--)
So, in cleaning out a section of my barn—the one mice declared their feed and dumpster—I found, again (one of the loveliest phrases to me: found, again [nearly as winning as found, anew]:—here the comma enters a little sorrow, a vague-knowing surprise, a lot of “epiphany” at the anticipation of one’s next breath), I found again old things that meant so much: The Message in the Bottle, writings by Walker Percy. I say “writings” as much as “thinkings”—and as much, in this way, as the ontological act fused in language . . . or expressing oneself as vital as blood, as necessary as “job,” as central as courage, conviction, personality and sense of self. As essential to the bird as flight or song.
At the same time I found things that meant so much, once, but had to be thrown away—without a thought. There was thought, even contemporarily. Attachment had to be severed.
Some things survive, others go the way of compost—and then survive newly. To sever attachment is what Walker Percy says to me when he urges himself to think of metaphor as a natural happenstance, the coincidence or irony, sleight of hand or “mis-”/understanding of language. What lingers in one ear bears. What got left out by apostrophe indicates—even an absence.
That a record player is called a “seabird” by its users, but was itself a product of the Seeburg manufacturing company, is a matter of sublime translation. That a text “becomes” an animal that will not immediately sit (the cat [who] circles your lap before it curls to rest). The eyes & ears of individuals love and yearn in gears greased with their own oil. Who knew such baby’s breath would become such force of will, declaration—if by innocence or empowerment, authority or audacity. “Misreadings”—Walker Percy thought—offer “the regular experience of that heightened, that excited sense of being which we find in poetry.”
Walker Percy suggests the “prolonged analogy” that Aristotle and Dante were inclined to use, a subtle kind of metaphor over a mixed geography of words instead of what has become a pill of instant cunning. The prolonged analogy is the work of the poem but it is also the work of storytellers, epics, a band’s “lp” recording, dances and imagistic films, the sum and parts of visual works of art, and—partly because their sum is an accumulation of parts: the novel if, at its base and in the force/being of every word, the language unfolds in the innocence of first discovery. . . or anew.
Percy: “the action takes place among the common things of concrete experience and yet yields an analogy”—“by the very thingness of the action” (which brings us back to William Carlos Williams, naturally, and the role of poetry in everyday language).
This considered, “Sentences refer to different worlds.” (1.522, “A Triadic Theory of Meaning” [Walker Percy]).
The message in the bottle is not the comprehension of a statement only, it is—as well—the experience of the entire vessel and passage, the finding, the uncorking, the amazement of ratio of air/moisture amid the fact of its existence, the unfathomable minute by minute journey by tides/traps/teasing, the wet sand as fellow passengers, the sheen of your own reflection in the bow of glass—looking “into” the artifact of assumed words, a creature within an astronautical womb, a context emerging in the imagination. A set of circumstances that constituted a moment in a life—and now another moment, breathing, configuring, a tongue to the mind in a passage of time.
At the same time I found things that meant so much, once, but had to be thrown away—without a thought. There was thought, even contemporarily. Attachment had to be severed.
Some things survive, others go the way of compost—and then survive newly. To sever attachment is what Walker Percy says to me when he urges himself to think of metaphor as a natural happenstance, the coincidence or irony, sleight of hand or “mis-”/understanding of language. What lingers in one ear bears. What got left out by apostrophe indicates—even an absence.
That a record player is called a “seabird” by its users, but was itself a product of the Seeburg manufacturing company, is a matter of sublime translation. That a text “becomes” an animal that will not immediately sit (the cat [who] circles your lap before it curls to rest). The eyes & ears of individuals love and yearn in gears greased with their own oil. Who knew such baby’s breath would become such force of will, declaration—if by innocence or empowerment, authority or audacity. “Misreadings”—Walker Percy thought—offer “the regular experience of that heightened, that excited sense of being which we find in poetry.”
Walker Percy suggests the “prolonged analogy” that Aristotle and Dante were inclined to use, a subtle kind of metaphor over a mixed geography of words instead of what has become a pill of instant cunning. The prolonged analogy is the work of the poem but it is also the work of storytellers, epics, a band’s “lp” recording, dances and imagistic films, the sum and parts of visual works of art, and—partly because their sum is an accumulation of parts: the novel if, at its base and in the force/being of every word, the language unfolds in the innocence of first discovery. . . or anew.
Percy: “the action takes place among the common things of concrete experience and yet yields an analogy”—“by the very thingness of the action” (which brings us back to William Carlos Williams, naturally, and the role of poetry in everyday language).
This considered, “Sentences refer to different worlds.” (1.522, “A Triadic Theory of Meaning” [Walker Percy]).
The message in the bottle is not the comprehension of a statement only, it is—as well—the experience of the entire vessel and passage, the finding, the uncorking, the amazement of ratio of air/moisture amid the fact of its existence, the unfathomable minute by minute journey by tides/traps/teasing, the wet sand as fellow passengers, the sheen of your own reflection in the bow of glass—looking “into” the artifact of assumed words, a creature within an astronautical womb, a context emerging in the imagination. A set of circumstances that constituted a moment in a life—and now another moment, breathing, configuring, a tongue to the mind in a passage of time.
Monday, August 2, 2010
The "story" is in the language. . ./ And we begin in "rain" (noting, now, that important moment in Fahrenheit 451)
I read my novella anew today: "You like the rain?" the book-burner conscript Montag retorts, as if to offer an irrefutably universal dislike to the inquisitive teacher Clarisse in Fahrenheit 451--as if rain, to the annoyance of everything, clearly follows its own course (and therefore to no good. . . ). . . as if liking that which we cannot control would be crazy; --as if giving-in to something whose nature amounts, contributes, and does not at its base reduce or destroy is a form of weakness? Or do we disavow the barriers enforced to contain us? "You like the rain?" he cites as if to seal any argument for liking rain. Yet Clarisse's joyful reply is as loose as rain, "I adore it!" So now Che and this moment come to language in common. (Che begins with rain.) I had not realized it, but this was the fitting note to begin a textual revolution.
If I may, the story is in the language.
If I may, the story is in the language.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Readers Respond To Che
http://www.blazevox.org/bk-pm.htm
Link directly to the publisher's book page, complete with readers' comments, by visiting the Chethenovella PROFILE to your right and entering "My Web Page". Or, paste the address above into your browser to read what others have said about Che, and to find how to buy the novella. The interview link with Peter Money is below; paste, or search "Peter Money interview" in Google.
Link directly to the publisher's book page, complete with readers' comments, by visiting the Chethenovella PROFILE to your right and entering "My Web Page". Or, paste the address above into your browser to read what others have said about Che, and to find how to buy the novella. The interview link with Peter Money is below; paste, or search "Peter Money interview" in Google.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)