XLVII

What, properly speaking, is a literary transition, or how one passes from one sentence to the next, from one chapter to the next? Does this not mean breaking both with what has come before while pursuing a thought through this rupture which is prolonged in order that it can develop? The blank space left at the heart of the text is not empty but on the contrary is the fertile place within which, without one having written, some text continues to advance; where some flagging thought finds, by discontinuing, the force of is continuity: where the argument, giving way to lack. Is called upon to link itself together…

[To affirm this] one will revisit in one’s mind this beautiful image…from ancient China: when one is in a boat and raises the oars for a moment, such is the art of transition. One no longer paddles, the movement of rowing – of writing – is interrupted, but the boat is carried along and pursues it course.

Says Jullien in The Silent Transformations, trans. Krzystof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson. London: Seagull Books, 2011.

 

If you close your eyes and fall backward into your arms, do you catch yourself?

 

Binary code: the ultimate, apparent, victory of no transition. Simply absolute state to absolute state of being and nonbeing. Apparent, or rather illusory, because the analog (attempted mutually-exclusive opposites again) is always with us, is us, and therefore the inescapable relational.

 

When you come from so many different cultures and you leave all of their nuances behind and you are at sea… in a new country, what you are going to understand are the simplest possible markers. How many dollars, how many A’s in school, how many neon lights. And in order to make any comparisons at all – and you have got to make some comparisons – you have got to find out who you want your kids to be like and who you don’t want them to be like.

Said MM to JB in R on R.

 

All we are saying is give thought a rest.

 

And what could be more binary than black and white? [Yes but always re(a)d all over.]

And here, when, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, the psychic structures of white supremacy crumbled, because “white” had been less even than a paper tiger, apart from its violence, there was simply nothing to provide cultural cohesion, even bad cultural cohesion. There was no longer any point in black people trying to be like white people, or opposing themselves to white people, since white people plainly weren’t themselves. This is not a problem you can solve by killing three million Vietnamese. It is not a problem you can solve, later, by getting into soccer and imagining you are now playing with the world. It takes not only something more, but something other.

 

We seek a unity of principle that simply does not exist. When we become obsessed with this, the result is personal or social psychosis.

 

They still call that part of the house a living room. But baby, you call that living?

 

Divergence (écart) simultaneously gestures toward intersection. Even at the other side of the world.

 

Meanwhile, how do you disengage from a collusion course?

 

As you cross 30th Street beneath the el in Astoria, a train clatters overhead, slowing down as it nears the Ditmars terminus. The rhythm of the wheels comes heavily, as though they were not round but rather some uniform, but asymmetrical shape. You peasant, you peasant! they mock. Or are they simply proclaiming, The present!

 

 

Someone has been torturing the skies over New York. Can clouds scream?

 

And so caught up were the people in the wonders of cadence and alliteration that no one thought to confirm that Jehosaphat had actually left the ground.

 

If people don’t include a historical point of view they can act more definitely. Said Mead in R on R.

 

Walk on water, walk on leaf

Hardest of all is to walk on grief.

            —W.N., an incarcerated 16-year-old, circa 1970, quoted by Baldwin in R on R.

 

Put at its most distilled, the West was already on the road the moment it abstracted logos out of the integral all and nothing to produce Truth. We have been hard at work producing Truth ever since. And, of course, to consume it and, since we generate a surplus, force feed it to others if necessary. For what is more terrifying than lack is simply over-production.

Eat children. With or without the comma.

 

Mobility is not synonymous with transition.

Freedom is not synonymous with mobility.

 

Toss a snake. Does it come down tails or heads?

 

…the bias of Being.

—Jullien in The Silent Transformations.

Nothing to see, nothing to see.

Who knew the immemorial cop was a Zen master?

 

“All Nature faithfully” – But by what feint

Can Nature be subdued to art’s constraint?

Her smallest fragment is still infinite!

And so he paints but what he likes in it.

What does he like? He likes, what he can paint!

Writ Nietzsche.

 

Mead: Civilizations aren’t individuals, Jimmy. They’re not individuals, they’re not organisms. [A Rap on Race, p. 181]

Huh – come again? Well what are they then, Maggie, mineral deposits? [E.D., not J.B.]

 

No water, no coffee.

 

The cortex giveth and it taketh away.

 

…now in the twentieth century we are going to find out two terrible facts: the fact of prose, on every single level from television to the White House, and the fact of the hope of poetry, without which nobody can live. I use poetry now in its most serious sense.

Says Jimmy in R on R.

 

The great Western road, one might say one-way street, one might say dead end toward representation as being. As in Omgyod, Christina, every blade of grass, as in the death of a thousand cuts.

Yet who can confront “Lo Zuccone” (literally “pumpkin,” but meaning “baldy”), without feeling the uncanny sense that provoked its creator, Donatello, in Vasari’s recounting, to shout at the obdurate stone: Favella, favella, che ti venga il cacasangue! [Speak, speak, or may you catch the bloody shits!]?

To which curse the figure of Habakkuk, who had openly questioned the wisdom of G*d for not taking action against violence and injustice and felt under no obligation to respond, said zip. And anyway he was a statue.

But does not mean that statues cannot have “life,” or even “being”? Perhaps they can. But the Western road, of Donatello and Frankenstein, leads to silence, to the silence out of which not being but transition grows.

There is a moment, to keep with the relation between transformation from one particularized form of being to another, and transition, which embraces the totality of change and change as totality, when Galatea is both stone and flesh. But we cannot perceive it. So we cannot accept its reality, hence are driven back on the rocks of ontology. And Schödinger finds himself, quite pointlessly, quite helplessly, at a loss for one perfectly good cat for no good reason at all. Not to mention the cat’s reality.

Transformation, then, is like lifting one’s oars, yet being yet borne along. And, in the mind, by suspending, or at least not putting all one’s weight on the or’s.

 

 

Proposal for a new word: thign, pronounced “thine,” a contraction of “thing” and “sign.”

 

There is a smooth and even transition, dependent on function, between what Plato called “reality,” and what he called “appearance.” [emphasis mine] From E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969.

 

To use the word “artificial” seems immensely far removed from art. But this was not always so. The works of cunning craftsmanship in myth and story include precious toys and intriguing machines, artificial singing birds, and angels blowing real trumpets. And when men [sic] turned from the admiration of artifice to the worship of nature, the landscape gardener was called in to make artificial lakes, artificial waterfalls, and even artificial mountains. For the world of man is not only a world of things; it is a world of symbols where the distinction between reality and make-believe is itself unreal. The dignitary who lays the foundation stone will give it three taps with a silver hammer. The hammer is real, but is the blow? In this twilight region of the symbolic, no such questions are asked, and therefore no answers need be given. [Gombrich, op. cit.]

 

For Plato and for those who followed him, definitions were something made in heaven. The idea of man, couch, or basin was something fixed eternally with rigid outlines and immutable laws. Most of the tangles into which the philosophy of art and the philosophy of symbolism have got themselves can be traced back to this awe-inspiring starting point. For once you accept the argument that there are rigid classes of things, you must also describe their image as a phantom. But a phantom of what? What is the artist’s task when he represents a mountain – does he copy a particular mountain, an individual member of the class, as the topographic painter does, or does he, more loftily, copy the universal pattern, the idea of a mountain? [Gombrich, op. cit.]

 

Seven billion Hamlets. And one big Hamelin.

 

What happens in paranoia stays in paranoia.

 

Ah, the bell boys and thugboats of the harbor.

 

Can you balance parchment on your knee and write so perfectly, and if you’re asked why you don’t have a table you say it’s not sturdy enough, asks MM in R on R.

 

When I travel from Paris to Brittany, I often look out the window of the train as I come closer to the great modification I anticipate. But it always eludes me. At Le Mans we are still in the dependency of Paris and the legendary ‘basin’ where the landscape remains open. But at Laval we have definitively slipped into a strange, remote land one that has become secret, in spite of its flatness. And yet there is no demarcation between the two. Is the mutation read in the passage, in the subsoil, from limestone to granite, or from the tiles to the slate on the roofs of the houses, or in the greenness of the meadows, or in the form of the bells ore even in the skies, no longer tenderly ‘veiled in pink vapours’ (Baudelaire), but where the clouds are from that point on structured in dizzying forms, so sharply chiseled by the setting sun? When therefore has the marine element started to appear in the atmosphere or in the life of the people? One thing is certain: even if nothing indicates it in the relief, everything has changed before our eyes, without its being perceived, and even to the way the sun sets behind the clouds. A great shattering has occurred in the course of the journey without there being a crack to betray it. It is as if nothing has happened. Because this expectancy, or this ambiance, this ‘atmosphere’, are not demarcated in terms of properties and are therefore impervious to our ontological engagement.

Writes Jullien in The Silent Transformations.

 

It is up to us, writes Gombrich, how we define a mountain. [Indeed, but must we define it? Is G*d holding a lightning bolt to our heads? Speak, speak or may you have the bloody shits!]

We can, he continues, make a mountain out of a molehill, or ask our landscape gardener to make one. We can accept the one or the other [binarily] according to our whim. There is a fallacy in the idea that reality contains such features as mountains and that, looking at one mountain after another, we slowly learn to generalize and to form the abstract idea of mountaineity. We have seen that both philosophy and psychology have revolted against this time-honored view. Neither in thought nor in perception do we learn to generalize. We learn to particularize, to articulate, to make distinction where before there was only undifferentiated mass. [emphasis mine, Gombrich, op. cit., pp. 100-101.]

What a very curious statement. What a curious spectacle, watching the West consume itself. Like Erysichthon, king of Thessaloniki. “O, woodman, spare that tree.”

 

The ideal house, says R.L. Stevenson in his short essay of that name, must be within hail of either a little river or the sea. A great river is more fit for poetry than to adorn a neighborhood; its sweep of waters increases the scale of the scenery and the distance of one notable object from another; and a lively burn gives us, in the space of a few yards, a greater variety of promontory and islet, of cascade, shallow goil, and boiling pool, with answerable changes both of song and colour, than a navigable stream in many hundred miles. The fish, too, make a more considerable feature of the brookside, and the trout plumping in the shallow takes the ear. A stream should, besides, be narrow enough to cross, or the burn hard by a bridge, or we are at once shut out of Eden. The quantity of water need be of no concern, for the mind sets the scale, and can enjoy a Niagara Fall of thirty inches. Let us approve the singer of “Shallow rivers, to whose falls / Melodious birds sing madrigals.” [Shakespeare, Merry Wives of Windsor, Act III, Scene I. Or, Marlowe, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.” Or perhaps a turn of phrase then in common use and appropriated by both.]

 

In 1972, Edweard Muybridge, working for railroad magnate and California governor Leland Stanford, recorded, via a series of stop action photos, the instantaneous non touching of the ground by any of a galloping horse’s four feet. What say you to that, Pegasus?

 

The runaway donkey bestseller: Eat, Bray, Love

 

Este e ouk esti: from Parmenides’s lips to Shakespeare’s ear and out of the Danish Prince’s mouth – the whole procession of it one great Hamlet Machine.

 

If Truth is revealed (apocalypse, i.e. uncovering) only at the moment of death, is all life therefore falsehood? Is it possible that Truth is not reducible to eschatology, to the convergence on the horizon of perspective lines, but is simply immanent in reality, as is falsehood?