writing Archives

Sounding Branches

On phantoms, limbs, and being an instrument.

The phenomenon of the phantom limb, the doctor explained, was once regarded as a purely psychic hallucination, the sort of thing the mind does when it is grappling with loss, denial being a well-trodden pathway for managing grief. The sense of moving fingers even after the arm is gone was compared to the way that you might see a loved one in their bathrobe and slippers muddling down the hallway looking for the light switch, in the days and weeks after their death.

But it turns out there is more to it, they realized, as the tools for observation expanded what researchers were willing to see––and listen to, for that matter. A pianist long versed in playing music through the body will continue to do so even after the loss of an arm. The music runs through the musician as practiced, even as only some of it reaches the keys.

The discovery raises certain questions about the nature of what was considered phantom and suggests that the idea of limb might also deserve some expansion. I am wondering about the word instrument, too––how immediately we tend to assume that these are what the musician uses to create the art, that the point is somehow mastery of a tool and not instead the long practice of erasing the old ideas of the boundaries of a body, smoothing its distinctive forms and shaping hollow wells of space, tending it daily so as to leave it well enough and ready to be moved.

***

This post was inspired by something I heard over ten years ago on a radio interview with the late Oliver Sacks. I found a related anecdote in his chapter “Phantom Fingers: the case of the one-armed Pianist” in his Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.

The New Science

On signs, symbols, and the origins of meaning.

Trace it with me: age of gods, age of heroes, age of men.

Our first language was born of knowing its poverty.

We relied on signs and symbols. Then came metaphor,

and then our measly letters, where we pretended

to be saying precisely what we meant.

Hieroglyphs suffice when observance

is more important than discussion,

as with religions and the like.

Which came first, I wonder? Letters or language,

chickens or their eggs?

Attempting to separate one from the other is folly.

The first speakers, by necessity of nature, were poets.

Here is the key to any meaningful science worth following:

the source of all poetry is poverty of language,

catalyzed by a need to express.

The point? To learn the language

spoken by some eternal history,

across time. Another: to name

the beginnings of learning.

To our unseen source, knowledge

and creation are one

and the same. We

are mind and spirit;

intellect and will, but

it’s the function of wisdom

to fulfill both.

Children of nascent mankind

created things according to their ideas,

which are not to be confused with God.

But usually are.

The role of fear

should not be discounted here,

in stoking robust ignorance,

corporeal imagination.

Frightened men,

in their infinite vanity,

no sooner imagine than they believe.

Natural curiosity, the daughter

of ignorance and mother

of knowledge, gives birth:

to wonder.

By Jove, the thundering sky.

***

Adapted from The New Science of Giambattista Vico, translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch.

Apologies for Presentation

Remembering Aphra Behn.

The following is adapted from Aphra Behn’s preface to The Lucky Chance, which strikes me as emblematic of the fraught balance she and others like her (mostly unknown, we must assume) had to strike, to hold her own as a writer of serious power while treading very carefully around the prejudices and biases of her detractors. I don’t know what moved me to revisit Behn this morning, but I am grateful for its nudge.

***

I reject old Horace’s idea of literature as some tool to instruct and delight. You want a morality lesson, read the holy books. This is something else. However, it seems like a long walk to go from my avoidance of moral instruction to the assumption of the innately corrupting influence of my work, a stance that seems so popular among my critics. I think that those attribute the capacity of my work to offer vile offense to “feminine sensibilities” do significantly underestimate what the average woman is exposed to on a regular basis, living and moving through a world of men. I daresay her daily movements should afford her plenty that is amply more objectionable than anything I can deliver. But somehow, the taint seems to come from the inherent corruption on my part. Any woman so bold as to demand an audience, must, after all, be possessed of something that some men may wish to permanently prevent others from having contact with, lest it be catching. Considering the self interest in their malice, I challenge any person of common sense not so willfully bent on ill nature that they will read some double entendre in anything, to resist the impulse to charge what frightens them with alternate blows of scandal and pity.

Sense and Sensibilities

Considering the shaking words.

Given certain habits, the act of writing seems so intuitive that we may forget the necessary combinations that work to move the pen, those complicated motions of transmission by volition. Any number of circumstances might impair the original purpose. Consider shaking the words as a method of execution. Keep in mind, some are better interpreters than others. The wily and cunning require caution, but those among them know there is no deception here. Some will put a certain constraint on words, but this is a difficult part to play. It is easier to write like a fool than a madman. The habit of division into camps of sane and in––is mischievous. A closer look at almost any certainty will reveal strong connecting links between the given state in question and its imagined opposite.

***

Inspired by, and with borrowed phrases from G. Mackenzie Bacon’s On the Writing of the Insane (1870).

A Word Beyond

Learning by signs.

Inspired by this morning’s reading, from Augustine’s The Trinity, as translated by Stephen McKenna.

All things are learned by signs, and every sign is also a thing. Each thing must be understood just as it is, but a sign may only be known by appreciating how it signifies something else.

Smoke needs no special will to signify fire, neither do the tracks of an animal to point to its presence. Same goes for naked expression of emotion on the face. Words, on the other hand. Also consider sounds of trumpet, flute, harp, and drum, each with its own layered invocations to nuanced representation.

A vibration in the ear passes quickly; hence, a need for letters. Here is where pride limits those who would build a tower to claim the heavens as their own. In retribution, voices and signs in the rubble of Babel are dissonant. We can neither hear nor read each other, fully.

Allegory, enigma, parable, irony. Recognition of these tropes may reveal what is hidden––and yet, never more than through a glass, darkly. Some thoughts are speeches of the heart. It is what leaves the mouth, not what enters it, that may defile or edify.

Speech is one thing, sight another. To reflect is to make these one. How will you understand those words that belong to no language?

Gathering

Consider what is cloaked in story.

My bread prepared, time calls. The ship is leaving port. Consider the surface like a poet’s fable.

Consider also what is cloaked in story: truth behind the ornament of fiction, Orpheus’s lyre taming nature as wisdom over the cruel heart.

Then consider discovery, the possibility that a reader might know transfiguration. Last, beyond the senses, what a soul may know when it leaves: no womb beyond the elements, no warmth without cold, nor word without silence of the beginning and the end.

No single sense, but senses. No goat song, foul at the end. Give me instead a tragic beginning, the known world all fire. Then, let me follow and welcome me home.

***

Inspired by (and borrowing phrases from) Dante’s Il Convivo, as translated by Richard H. Lansing.

An Elegant Intelligence

Is it the stone that makes the statue beautiful, or something else?

The following is a meditation culled from ideas and phrases emerging from time spent this morning with Plotinus, namely with his treatise “On the Intellectual Beauty” from his Fifth Ennead, written between the years 300-305 A.D. Plotinus was of the group of Neoplatonists that located reality “in a transcendental spiritual realm that gives meaning to the visible world” (from the Norton Anthology introduction).

***

Plato may have distrusted the storytellers, but I’d rather hear them than any new ideas.

Rather than pale imitation of more perfect forms, art is the access point for transcendence.

Nature is an emanation from a higher realm, its source the same as art. Here we are, between the worlds.

Let’s go to the realm of magnitudes. Suppose two blocks of stone, side by side: one untouched, another wrought by an artist’s hands into a fine statue, concentrating all loveliness of form. Is it the stone that makes the statue beautiful, or something else?

The form is not the material, but the design, held not by crude equipment, but participation. Revelation happens when the resistance of the materials is subdued. The resistance? Stone, yes, but also these hands, these eyes, this stubborn heart. Every prime cause, indwelling, more powerful than its effect. What is musical comes from music itself. You may call it God, although I won’t.

Also note how the elegance will not depend on magnitude. Where does it come from, if not an original power? All gods are august in grace beyond our speech, and why? All there is, is heaven. Truth, then, is mother and nurse. All transparent, light running through light, all only mirrors.

Eyes in the divine, no satiety to call for its ending: to see is to look at greater length. Wisdom is not built of reasonings, but primal, complete from the start.

Powers of fire and the like may be thought great, but it is through their failure in true power that we see them burning, destroying, wearing things away––slaving toward production, they destroy because they belong to the realm of the produced.

There is no beauty outside being. Only in self-ignorance are we ugly. Light upon light, shine.

Present, Past

In memory of the work of Walker Evans, American photographer.

In honor of the birthday of Walker Evans, the American photographer credited as the “progenitor of the documentary tradition” with an “extraordinary ability to see the present as if it were already the past,” today’s post is assembled from phrases from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the work of Evans’ collaboration with writer James Agee, chronicling the lives of Depression-era sharecropping families (quotes above come from The Met Museum’s page on his work).

These eyes, blank and watchful: neither forgiveness for unforgiveness, heat nor cool, or any sign of understanding, were not the first to look away.

The hallway in mud, and underwater, rain beating on rain beating on rain, out the brains of the earth. Steady rave and the breakage of thunder. The lamp is out, room breathing cool like a lung, ripe with the smell of rain on earth, and kerosene.

Where are the introductions now? Each mind disguised again in lack of fear, and busy.

Art and Silence

Considering the subtle choreography of silence.

On this day in 1973, philosopher and political scientist Leo Strauss died at the age of seventy-four. Among his many works, Strauss published Persecution and the Art of Writing in 1941. In honor of the occasion, this will be the text for today’s found reflection––not quite a found poem, but a meditation constructed at least partially with phrases from a parent text.

Once there were public spaces of free public discussion, and now it may be worthwhile to consider certain compulsions: to coordinate speech with the accepted norms of a given group.

Hasn’t this always been true? Perhaps, and yet. The possibilities of voiding a name have never been more endless; it remains unclear yet if they run parallel to those for saving one.

The issue is no longer so clear cut. People vs. government? Only sometimes. People vs. the ideas they have been conditioned to believe are their own? Frequently. People vs. machine? Often, and yet: few blanket statements are effective. People vs. the blanket statement, easily codified into an algorithm? Here is something.

Who checks the rampant impulses that so many have been conditioned to believe themselves to own? Compulsion paves the way by silencing contradiction.

If freedom of thought is the ability to choose from among a variety of ideas, what happens when a choice is diminished from a vast number of possibilities to a simple either vs. or? What account can ever be made for censorship by noise?

There is no need to silence the still, small voice when it may be easily overcome––on first listen, anyway––by an onslaught of noise. What does the average listener call a statement constantly repeated without contradiction, but true?

Signs and Symbols

A found poem introduction to the definitive introduction to literary theory.

The following is assembled from phrases found in the opening six pages of The Norton’s Anthology of Theory and Criticism, a text that some readers might find a touch dense, or perhaps conducive of a sprained wrist. I took the liberty of assembling this found poem from the text, to keep on hand for moments when something lighter is in order.

What does theory demonstrate? That there is no position free of it,

not even common sense. The same is true of an author’s inner being,

institutions, historical periods, and conflict.

What is interpretation? Consider dense and enigmatic

explication, exegesis––versus intimate, casual appreciation.

In order to establish our bearings,

along the way

we discuss.

True, there are problems

with seemingly sensible methods

––ambiguities, paradoxes, the problem of no easy

answers––and theorists, and well-known heuristic devices.

The notion of mirroring necessarily contains

distorting devices: signifiers, signified;

the crisis of reference; the dizzying view.

Significantly, it re-presents and refracts

certain affinities.