Paronymous Attraction

(This essay was written for Critical Animals, a research symposium held during This Is Not Art, Newcastle Australia, October 2009. The title comes from a poem by Aleksandr Skidan. Photograph of fireflies by Akihiro.)

Everything we need is here, nothing is missing. No omission, no repetition. It is rare, it is miraculous, that we may read openly, in a syntax as transparent as the work of mathematics, the coherent semantics of a universe already constructed. Yet nonetheless this is true.
– (Michel Serres)

Events are produced in chaos.
– (Gilles Deleuze)

Susan Howe says, “The selection of particular examples from a large group is always a social act.” This paper is a social act. I am interested in constellations beyond the usefulness of a rhetorical trope. If we can look to the stars and find a goat’s head, we can enact a similarly creative poesis when looking to the material of our experience. I am in Philadelphia, falling into an opposite weather pattern to Newcastle. In the northeast of America, the sky is pale and silvery, like the flanks of herring. Weather gets caught between the Appalachians – a curious ribcage – and the Atlantic. Three nights ago there was a thunderstorm that cracked through the air and woke me from a fever. You will find connections here in my language, you will sketch your own goat’s head.

down on luck

Looking over the shoulder of an English language-learner
a list of idioms, e.g., falling in love           and
a realisation (an ‘oh yes’)      it’s giving itself a
verb,           not loving but falling            a
bad feeling       or small shock         like slipping in
socks on a plank of wood             gutty and
uncontrolled     Another is ‘ to try one’s luck,’ something
obvious to me: trial or experiment, ‘give it a go’.
At this point we look out the bus window        at
the passing weathers and think           idioms or
not            this day is cracking its yolk everywhere

leonard cohen

because ever since god-knows-when
these are the waits traditional to
christmas – chinese dinners & ham
radios, eucalypts bled into watercolour
: “the sun poured down like honey.”
irish drums behave, in this instance,
as genetic coding

a purpose-built jigsaw tray that pulled
the skin & nail off my big toe – the
exact geometries of resemblance &
what it means to have sameness

sneaking behind a cactus garden for a
joint with uncle P : the ants so fat they
pop under shoes, or worse, climb to altitudes

puddingless and clotted, and with one
large gravy spoon, drunk. a desperation
or else, a physics kit, skull tattoos, underwear
embossed with glyphs of semi-quavers &

the smell of lavender a hit of snuff

archaeology of knowledge

“And the great problem presented by such historical analyses is not how continuities are established, how a single pattern is formed and preserved, how for so many different, successive minds there is a single horizon, what mode of action and what substructure is implied by the interplay of transmissions, resumptions, disappearances, and repetitions, how the origin may extend its sway well beyond itself to that conclusion that is never given – the problem is no longer one of tradition, of tracing a line, but one of division, of limits; it is no longer one of lasting foundations but one of transformations that serve as new foundations, the rebuilding of foundations. What one is seeing, then, is the emergence of a whole field of questions, some of which are already familiar, by which this new form of history is trying to develop its own theory: how is one to specify the different concepts that enable us to conceive of discontinuity (threshold, rupture, break mutation, transformation)? By what criteria is one to isolate the unities with which one is dealing; what is a science? What is an oeuvre? What is a theory? What is a concept? What is a text? How is one to diversify the levels at which one may place oneself, each of which possesses its own divisions and form of analysis? What is the legitimate level of formalization? What is that of interpretation? Of structural analysis? Of attributions to causality?”

– Foucault, The Archaeology of Knwowledge, p. 5-6

It’s paragraphs like these that remind me why I am doing a PhD.

phd cut-up; a found poem

born the son of a barge man, “I was six
for my first dead bodies”. active in a theatre
of war during 1939-45. the concept of the
parasite – Like a maggot in a turd he hid within
the word. Neil Young talks about Pocahontas. X
feels sad = X feels something, the history of corn
or gold-minding. I am interested in his opinion on
rationality. With my poor English it’s hard to
describe what I am up to: And now I am eager to
prove THAT and show it in detail! Thank you!
Orderly, dispassionate, and rational Europeans.

apprendre à vivre

I am at war with myself, it’s true, you couldn’t possibly know to what extent, beyond what you can guess, and I say contradictory things which are, we might say, in real tension; they are what construct me, make me live, and will make me die. I sometimes see this war as terrifying and difficult to bear, but at the same time I know that this is life.

I suspect that Derrida’s final interview, published recently as Learning to Live Finally, is one of the most perfect language-objects I have read. The interview was conducted only weeks before he died from an aggressive, terminal cancer, and the simultaneity of living-and-dying is evident, almost shockingly, in what he says. A person, nudging irreparably towards the limit of experience, calling on a radical shift from late-capitalist globalisation and economies of war. A person, so critically engaged that his transcribed language is algebraically parenthetical, relentless. A person, so aware of death that his presence is charged with the overwhelming continuity of emergence. Every word emerges. Every word is an emergency: THIS IS HAPPENING NOW! TAKE NOTICE! THIS IS IS-ING!

In the translator’s notes, it is said that Derrida remarked with sadness that the interview read as an obituary. Yet the presentness of death in his language does not have the ritual finality of a eulogy. Instead, it has the über-geometry of chance and potentiality. The practice of philosophy is the coming-to-terms with death — deathness, deathitude, deathology — and the coming-to-terms with living. The parallel, of course is with language (is it a parallel?) and with a question of survival (the very delicate hyphen between life and death.) Derrida says:

When it comes to thought, the question of survival has taken on absolutely unforeseeable forms. At my age, I am ready to entertain the most contradictory hypotheses in this regard: I have simultaneously—I ask you to believe me on this—the double feeling that, on the one hand, to put it playfully and with a certain immodesty, one has not begun to read me … on the other hand, and thus simultaneously, I have the feeling that two weeks or a month after my death there will be nothing left. Nothing except what has been copyrighted and deposited in libraries.

At heart is a question of sustainability: of experience and of language. And here is the delicate balance. To be at war with oneself, as we all are, with the productive tensions (kinetic energy) of sustainable creativity and attentiveness. Not to be, as it were, an unproductive feedback loop of self-loathing or self-consumption.