mothwood

[mothwood]

To write is certainly not to impose a form (of expression) on the matter of lived experience. Literature rather moves in the direction of the ill-formed or the incomplete [...] Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience. It is a process, that is, a passage of Life that traverses both the livable and the lived. Writing is inseparable from becoming: in writing, one becomes-woman, becomes-animal, or -vegetable, becomes-molecule, to the point of becoming-imperceptible. These becomings may be linked to each other by a particular line [...] or they may coexist at every level, following the doorways, thresholds, and zones that make up the entire universe [...] Becoming does not move in the other direction, and one does not become Man insofar as man presents himself as a dominant form of expression that claims to impose itself on all mater, whereas woman, animal, or molecule always has a component of flight that escapes its own formalization. The shame of being a man—is there any better reason to write?

Gilles Deleuze (trans. Daniel W. Smith & Michael A. Greco) Literature and Life 

[mothwood]

All will be difficult to say: the real word is never easy.

All will be hard: pitiless light excessive living too conscious of being.

All will be able to wound. Will be aggressively real. So real it rends us.

There is no pity in signs nor even in love: being is excessively lucid and word is dense and wounds us.

(All words are cruelty.)

— Orides Fontela (trans. Chris Daniels), Speech 

[mothwood]

                                                           A being is to begin

Laid down among the signs a self assigned. Decided it was only ever upward unto nothing, grass and wildflowers, each stem the very thread of trembling, as little weight as color on the eye. There was an order you could choose to enter, another, in doing so, to leave. You were, as before a river or tree decides to branch.

— Brian Teare, A being is to begin

[mothwood]

Propped up by language, then delivered from it. First, aligned with landmarks and points of reference, then far away, with neither landmark nor compass. First security, then abandon. The I only exists outside of the I. The I only thinks outside of the I [...] The I within language is reducible to the sum of its mother tongue, to the collective, to an undefined set of others, to the closure of the open group to which it belongs. It is set in its habits: caught in the I of language almost always and almost everywhere, our whole life long we do not live. I only really live outside of myself; outside of myself I think, meditate, know; outside of myself I receive what is given, enduringly; I invent outside of myself. Outside of myself, I exist, as does the world. Outside of my verbose flesh, I am on the side of the world.

Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies

[mothwood]

The differences that divide us [...] pale in comparison with the fact that we are all woven out of time, that we are born and we die, mayflies who live but a day. The inconceivable “now” escapes backward or inclines forward, it is already a memory or an aspiration. Speech, in which we communicate, is modulated time, just like music. And do not painting and architecture translate rhythm into space? I am filled with the memory of people who lived and died; I write about them, conscious all the while that in a moment, I, too, will be gone. Together we are like a cloud or a nebula among the human constellations of the twentieth century [...] our kinship rests on our having lived at the same time...

Czeslaw Milosz, Time

[mothwood]

What I’ve picked up is a letter—tossed Yesterday into the grass, beside the path. It has rained: the pages are stained with mud; Ink overflows from the words, illegible.

And yet the iridescence of these signs, Decomposed, now is almost light. The downpour has drenched a promise; The ink has become a puddle of sky.

Like this, let us love the words of the cloud: They too were a letter, and our lure; But light redeems them by passing through.

Shall I try to decipher these phrases? No: They are more to me, by coming undone. I dream that night is the breaking of day.

— Yves Bonnefoy (trans. Hoyt Rogers) Briefweg, in Warbende 

[mothwood]

The internal sense speaks at last and for the first time. The tent is printed with burning tongues and crowned with writing. Language arrives. The pavilion opens and shuts, contained but facing the outside. The woman is standing in her doorway, turned outwards, attentive, her body is given over to what is given. It is necessary to write the dative: TO. Defined by the closing of the volume on itself, the slightly open tent reveals itself. The body can write or say: MY. My body, my belonging, which behaves like a circle and turns in on itself. Monadic, the pavilion stands isolated on its island. Shut, open, it is revealed as singular. The body can say or write: ONE. Solitary belonging gives itself to itself and to what is given. Dense and blue, the body burns with stray languages. Empty like the tent, it leaves behind its jewels and regrets their absence: DESIRE [...]

I leave behind my jewels, those that my body was wearing, those displayed by my partial bodies when they were a scent of roses, a shiver of sounds, a simulacrum in the mirror...I carry them and shut them in the casket. I miss them. I am nostalgic for a lost world, a lost paradise, an island between two seas, where the senses sparkle like a lake of gemstones. I speak now and shelter in the tent of language or writing. The tabernacle closes, its flaps are lowered. I live now in the prison of my language and the jewel-box closes. Having withdrawn beneath the veils printed with tongues of fire and beneath the crown of the written cartouche, the body which has left the world mourns it, the woman who leaves behind her jewels misses them, the beauty of the five senses lies in the black box while we sleep under the blue hangings engraved with fire. Solitary belonging, devoted to itself, no longer devotes itself to what is given, except to what language gives us - to what is said or dictated.

This is the first sentence, the originary, primary proposition, as original as the fault committed in the past by a girl on a paradise-island, as original and permanent. These are the first words uttered by the body when it becomes an interiority endowed with a voice, and is enveloped in flames and imprinted with signs, when the skin-tapestry or the skin-pavilion no longer bears on itself lilacs or cheetahs but geometry and letters. This is the sentence that causes the world to flee and the necklets to be abandoned, that excludes rabbits and goats and that chased us from paradise, these are the words which cause the senses to withdraw into a black box. Our only desire is that it be reopened. The woman-summation bids farewell to the world, takes the veil beneath the tent of language.

This is the first cogito [...] I feel, I have felt; I have seen, heard, tasted, smelt; I have touched; I touch, I enclose myself in my pavilion of skin; it burns with languages, I speak; I speak about myself, about my loneliness and the nostalgia of lost senses, I mourn the lost paradise, I regret the loss of that to which I was giving myself or of what was given to me. Since that phrase was written, I desire. And the world absents itself.

This is the first, self-contained proposition, literally circular, the first stable unitary philosophy of identity. My desire identifies with writing, I exist only in language.

— Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies 

[mothwood]

Writing is not destined to leave traces, but to erase, by traces, all traces, to disappear in the fragmentary space of writing more definitely than one disappears in the tomb.

Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond 

[hildeeveraert]

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877 British) • Photoglyptic Gravure Ca 1860

[mothwood]

The rupture of the present created by the Eternal Return frees writing from any dependence on speech as presence by destroying the foundation that presence would supposedly provide for it. Without this foundation, it no longer plays the role of follower to speech. Writing responds to the demand of the return because [...] writing never begins, but is always beginning again. The time of the Eternal Return is the time of writing [...]

Lycette Nelson, introduction to Blanchot’s The Step Not Beyond 

[mothwood]

To see ourselves, should we look at each other? Sometimes we seem to each other to be part of the real world as though here, if anywhere, we came to reality directly. Is it symbolically true? We don’t relate to each other, we relate, or try to relate, to some outside symbol the other suggests to us; and if the other relates to us, it is again not to us it relates, but to something we had not supposed ourselves to be. The thing related to may be, as it seems to be, a part of the real world, but it is not we. We are in the real world as nothing in ourselves, as a skin on that world, as a network of nerves, an awareness not of ourselves but of that world, even though we might be that world’s awareness of itself. In this act of union, the self is shed like an exoskeleton and we lie so close against the real world our identity lies there.

William Bronk, Vectors and Smoothable Curves: Collected Essays 

[mothwood]

[...] see me rise like a flame,  like the sun, moon, stars, birds, wind. In light. In dark. But I never achieve it. I get on my knees this gray April to see if open crocuses have a smell. I must live in the suffering and desire of what rises and falls. The terrible blind grinding of gears against our bodies and lives.

Linda Gregg, It Is the Rising that I Love 

[mothwood]

...what am I if not a ray from some long-dead star? [...] dying in the flames of excessive potentiality?

George Bataille (trans. Stuart Kendall), Guilty 

[mothwood]

If I could just be a field in the morning fog. And I picture a crow cawing in it. I write like a bird singing as dawn approaches...To write is to take one's leave, to go someplace else. The bird that sings, the human being who writes—are delivered...I'm not writing for this world...I write for a different world — one that's indifferent to anything, anybody. I haven't any wish to impose myself on it and think of being there quietly as if absent. Clarity implies recognizing the necessity of having to disappear.

George Bataille (trans. Stuart Kendall), Guilty 

[mothwood]

The writer persists in playing with fire, for, in writing, “the body risks its own existence,”  is devoured by, but also persists with the fire, is sustained by the very process which devours her. The drama of writing is a ritual. Anne-Marie Albiach mentions an image of Kafka’s that has stayed with her: a wrist circled by a gold ring “at the same time scar and ornament: as for the elaboration of sacrificial writing … as if the writer were to be sacrificed to the body of the text.” It is the wrist, whose movement is the crucial physical basis of writing, that is dressed up for sacrifice. And, with the living author sacrificed to the other body, to the text, we have come full circle: only the sign systems exist; the body is textual. But we have added a religious dimension, even without the help of metaphor and symbol. Language, in atheistic times, is one of the forms of transcendence we have left. Or, to quote the ending of Edmond Jabes’s Return to the Book: “Man does not exist. God does not exist. The world alone exists through God and man in the open book.”

— Rosmarie Waldrop, “Shall We Escape Analogy?”

[mothwood]

I show them how the snow melts from the stone before it goes from the ground. Show them my joy without reason over this. I show them my passion for the white birches on the upper ground.  That whiteness in the midsts of gray maples. Those tender trees among the winter-wise evergreens. I tell them of being seventeen and alone, on my hands and knees with my mouth to the stream like a deer. Not strange, but unseen. Waking to the woods always, and that sound. I tell them how it can be wild high in the trees and quiet underneath where I go to see things which are dead and singing. Seeking with my mouth what is lowest and most forlorn. I go to where moss and ferns give themselves to my ignorance, making a song of themselves for me. And I sing back, making songs from the bones of belief.

Linda Gregg, Alma in the Woods

[mothwood]

True mourning in rooms – not the cemetery to find only absence – – in presence of things

Stéphane Mallarmé (trans. Paul Auster), A Tomb for Anatole