note of an iterative glyphicist

As I mentioned to you elsewhere (yes, I’ll write you here, too),
the postings of my various blogs (axially, this one) and Web pages are improvisational pieces (the Web pages relatively unimprovised) in
a developing Project which will lead to all being thematically disassembled into pieces figuring into a large-scale work.
(I didn’t put the matter quite so succinctly elsewhere). Current little ventures are provisional pieces, trOpical genes in a genealogy.

I was a teenage tri-psychal

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Literature, philosophy, and psychology is the sequence of domains that bridged late high school (philosophy in “English Seminar”) and college years (philosophy and psychology, double major). Then I got “politicized,” as they say (and sociologized, which I regret), which prevailed for graduate school and later.

aura of the hydra-headed wise guy

Near the beginning of chapter 1 of To Follow: the wake of Jacques Derrida (2010), Peggy Kamuf notes “...the dialogic or polylogic form of texts published under Derrida’s name alone,” i.e., bearing a pretense of unifiability (or implicit monology) due to a singularity of the author (presuming a singularity of authorship in being “Derrida”), though there’s “plurivocality in Derrida’s thought,” just as one might expect of a richly imaginative novelist. The singularity of Derrida (the living writer, now long dead) may be trivial relative to the plural interpsychalness of the writing (the living written) in light of inestimable influence (a wake of life, manifold Trace) originally. But the singularity is not trivial as existing life, trivial only for conceptual tourism that would keep philosophy mirroring one’s presumptions. (One book by Derrida is titled Whose Afraid of Philosophy?, playing on the title of the famous Edward Albee play, I suppose.) The singularity of Derrida’s originality may be primordially plural, proximally interpsychal, yet intrapsychally plural at heart; but not thusly so: The intrapsychalness isn’t a mere gestalt of its interpsychalness; the intrapsychalness isn’t translatable or reducible to an interpsychalness of the Trace (the wake of a life’s time). Instead, the plural psychalness belongs to Derrida singularly, such that any cohering conception of interpsychalness derives from the intrapsychalness so conceiving that (which only Derrida might have done—but would not do, as a matter of principle), a cohering otherwise being merely another’s proffered conception (by a theorist, a philosophical biographer, etc.) of singularity imputed. I look forward to seeing what Timothy Clark does in The Poetics of Singularity: the counter-culturalist turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot, and the later Gadamer (2005) one of these days.

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playhouse notes

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I’ve spent most free time of the past couple of weeks doing meta-writing or textual programming. A novelist mapping out the story is programming.

A resultant set of textual points or themes can orient a future free play along the path (I’ve intimated so often, one way or another). So, creativity can be as much about travel planning as narrating the trip.

I love metaplay.

booknote

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I looked forward to receiving today’s book order via shipping to my department, but the pleasure of seeing Harold Bloom’s final book was special, even moving, because the book, he says, is his last (of tens).
Old Harold has a renown in late 20th C academic literary studies comparable to Samuel Johnson in his era. He’s obsessed with Literature (he says at the beginning of his new book). For years, photos on book jackets show his white hair as disheveled as someone just out of bed,
like Einstein or Mark Twain.

thursdaynote — part 2

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part 1: a morning of perspective

It’s important to have balanced attitude toward the theater of world affairs. Is it my fault I get infatuated with Gail? Ms. Collins used to be the NYTimes Editorial Page Editor. One only achieves that royal position if one has a great nose for narrative called “news.”

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part 2: an evening of conceptual art

Julie Cloutier leaves pebble portraits around S.F. She finds a pebble, does a drawing of it, then places the drawing exactly where she found the pebble. Also, there is a map of the locations. It’s uncertain whether any of the drawings will be at those locations at a later time.

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an horizonal beauty

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Should you think (in the sense of affectation that means: In case you do so think) that I’m lost to some idiosyncratic way of mind, look at an account of Peggy Kamuf’s mourning of her dear friend Jacques Derrida, which may be about a sense of beauty on each side of mourning, which would be a principle of hope on the other side of lost potential. “Another name for this special kind of receptive vigilance—without which there would be no surprise— is ‘reading.’ Only when one approaches a text as an unknown other can one be surprised by it. To encounter the other, therefore, is to be on the watch for surprising encounters that can only take place when one encounters the other as text.”

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a cohering

a possibly-overwhelming appeal
of a conceptual nexus—no: comprehensiveness—implicated
in something, anything
of “the” world, one’s world
affairs—World
Affairs!—so many kinds of energies
forming so many kinds of flows
scenes
assemblages
personalities
species of idea
possibilities of design
Eros and Psyche possessing
conversations, unwittingly
improvised odysseys
pensive stillness, here: one more
thing to say
then another

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swimming notes

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I occasionally emphasize my obsession with news because the vague reminder is the most I make time to do online, to remind myself that writing of tragedy could consume me. I’m often embarrassed to seem oblivious.

But the reality is opposite: I strive to keep on track with what I can do, which happens to now be so many details of a writing project (sensitive to happy happenstances) that may seem to have no direction.

uphill, downhill—highland, midland

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8:06 pm

OK, the evening’s not over yet. I’ve had a productive weekend, but you’ve heard that one before: It doesn’t bear fruit, such productiveness.

“The fruit spent so much time setting up the pieces of the game that there was no time left to play. Maybe he finished. We left him to his designs.”

Yes, I finished (in a manner of speaking). But now I have to take a walk—in the rain which will cease its weekend reign in the upcoming days we have to go to the office where we may be thankful for little breaks.

So, ummm, if God is Good luck, then right now God is dead.

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circus note

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From The New York Times today, the end of “A Romp…,” by Dennis Overbye:

Some scientists say we won’t really understand life until we can make it ourselves.

On the last day of the conference, J. Craig Venter, the genome decoding entrepreneur and president of the J. Craig Venter Institute, described his adventures trying to create an organism with a computer for a parent.

touch

A narrative began mid-story—or a story began as ending—better living through rebirth in context; and a circus brought to touch a bi-cycle of lives were altogether removed to leave our narrator in a short pathos of too many titles in his dreams, dismissed through idle play with a keyword, as if cohering axis, troping uncounted possibilities for relationship.

days go by.3

Ironically, I’m obsessed with the news each day, yet don’t let that distract me from a venture that actually resulted, in part, from decades of obsession with the news—which, by the way, dissolved any dependence on notions that a past has clearly-causal efficacy (contrary to persons still, in effect, living in Cold War thinking), as if conceptions of history can well serve (not) understanding the emergent, evolving present out of evolving Time—though of course planetary life has inestimably definite structures and dynamics, but these are evolving in generative interplays (and mirrorplays) also evolving, just as a tangible organism has definite structure, yet thereby unpredictable plasticity.

humility of a venture

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Originally communal idealization in a pantheon of gods (which became humanistic idealization in God) wasn’t at heart an expression of implicitly given selfidentity (not a mirrorvanity of proffered perfection), but a venture of learning—adventuring self-formative advancement (which became “progress,” which was mapped back into nature as “evolutionary”— which, by the way, ecological natural selection, as such, is not)—progressivity that would (one hoped) enrich sensibility (beyond estate!) into/unto the richest conceivable senses of sensibility—broad, deep, high sense—and educe inhabitation by found heights.

One’s belief in human perfectibility at least promoted development and cultural evolution, even though the horizon always receded.

loving to make an academic issue

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“The” current issue for me is literary psychological inquiry.

That isn’t the same as saying: “I’m currently interested in literary psychological inquiry.“ Yes, I’m interested in that (have been “forever”), but these days I’m seeing the interest especially in a large-scale context of philosophical interest that my literary-psychlological interests (call it, for short, LP interests) didn’t imply years ago. I’m now moving into a focus on LP inquiry that’s part of the larger-scale interest (or—choose your favorite cliché of mine—the larger-scale venturing, journeying, seafaring, vining, or pathmaking), which includes my LP interests as issue.

leaving the stage to rethink a theater

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a substantial change of address
(and appendix to “creative fidelity”)

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version 1

I’ve gone for awhile. Take what you please. In the meantime, I don’t forget you. I’ll be back to you in spring.

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version 2

One can only share something (e.g., stage a play) if there’s something (the play) to share, obviously. Wanting to share something substantial implies having something substantial to share, first wanting to do the substantial work (or to obtain the substantial thing) that one wants to share.

backstage notes

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Finishing “creative fidelity” feels like a milestone, not because it’s especially comprehensive of what I want to do going forward (it’s not) or difficult (not), but because it draws closure on something that began over a year ago, and this is somewhat represented by “c.f.”’s frequent linking back to earlier pages. I feel I’ve won a justified freedom now to write as eccentrically as I please without contradicting (or undermining) my fidelity to living very ordinarily wherever that’s apt—ethically, cogently, and graciously. But that’s as if life isn’t theater; yet life is theater, to my sensibility. Particularly theatrical is the pretense that life isn’t theater.

to be really realistic...

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I’m simply me. It’s not complicated. I can make it complicated.
But I don’t seek that.

I have the interests I have. So it goes. I get enthusiastic about things easily, and I’m thankful. It’s not egoistic to be thankfully enthused about things that don’t interest many others, if I don’t blame others for not having my interests (which would otherwise be very silly.

as if there’s no news

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a note on dancing lightly in a thematological map

I know the leading news of the day, the past week, every week (of recent decades). If you’re reading this years from now (Jan. 15, 2011), you might have no idea what the leading news has recently been, probably in part because time dissolves a vibrant Moment into so many wakes. However, I don’t wish to give long-range salience to this week’s leading news. Besides, significance to Time is likely not immanent, though intimated in the Moment, invisibly to most witnesses (and commentators).

There are themes that become trends, and some that last for the lot of us, even some born fully in a Moment. But we likely don’t know which Moments, themes, or trends will endure. This season’s leading events will vine with uncounted others to give a weave to their season (which, you know, I rendered earlier), maybe at the scale of an era to be later defined by those who define eras.

pre-positional soup

He’s in love
with a complex, some Intimacy of Flourishing
in resonance with questions
of domainity as such (thus interdomainity),
legacy and scholarship irt lifeworld
consolidation of learning, reading, and thinking—a world
irt (and/or versus) a life, easily
presuming on itself an implicature
of the world, the World—to a life, at least,
surely (if unclearly) the world of one life,
nebulously open to where it’s going,
how best to further its wayfaring,
as the world does idealize a confidence expressed
by the rhetorical lucidity of the specialist,
like a professional theorist,
let alone a connoisseur of conceptual design,
classically the organotechnologist called a “philosopher,”
now to be a strange hybrid of academia
entwined in our evolutionarity of mind:
no happenstance but enactive
mirrorplay of drawing and evincing,
argument and teaching.

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