Captain ad hoc

Talking about her small daughter’s drawings, a friend said “Ruby’s people have now got fingers and eyebrows – wonder what they’ll grow next week...”. Her words immediately reminded me of two lines from Sylvia Plath's Love Letter,

"I started to bud like a March twig:
An arm and a leg, an arm, a leg."

When I was looking for an online version of the poem to link to, the first six I opened all had the same two mistakes: “mice-scaled” (!!) for “mica-scaled” and “An arm and a leg, and arm, a leg”. (vaguely reminiscent of Gertrude Stein’s “as a wife has a cow, a love story”).

I also remember quoting those words early on in analysis, (the Plath, not the Stein) when I felt that parts of me were coming alive, coming back to life or coming into being. I was overly optimistic at the time, believing naively that progress would somehow be sort of linear.

Not according to the brilliant article by Todd McGowan in the latest edition of The International Journal of Žižek Studies; “Violence of Creation in "The Prestige"”. (see left sidebar). Coincidentally, I watched the film recently, failed to recognise David Bowie, and at the end was convinced I had missed at least some of the points. I was not mistaken.

As I also failed to grasp how to put categories on this blog, or to put the blog posts into categories, I created two parallel-universe blogs for my own writing, one in English (Vita Text) and one in French (Vita Texte). I will be adding things on an ad hoc basis, as and when they are brought to mind through an association of some kind.

I am also adding a link to a bilingual blog hosted by a French translator who lives in England, naked translations. I have not been following it closely but intend to do so because it is very interesting.

Talking about translation is a minefield I am scared to wander into, because I am bound by confidentiality agreements. I don’t always trust myself to know where to draw the line, restraint not being one of my strong points.

After a period of heavy rain I was watering the plants around the house that are deprived of rainwater by the eaves, and I thought of the expression “eavesdropping”. (Etymology: Anglo-Saxon yfæsdrypæ a person who stands under the eaves to listen to conversations.) . I suppose that is part of the phantasmagoria of the blog, that some mysterious other is lurking on the edges, either deliberately to steal information for dastardly purposes or simply because the rain started when they were passing and they stopped to keep dry.

Another high window

A shimmer of hope

in the pool with the ghoul

and I danced to disturb the fashionable mother.

Some greater other croaked

And a long-lost brother soaked

In the irony of a perpetual inkling.

This, then, is the drift, when the goalposts shift, make sure you know that

Love is being with the right person at the right time and realising it.

Collage

I got stuck at a passage in Hegel that speaks of lordship and bondage. First of all, I couldn’t accept that the master was just as oppressed by the relationship as the slave, or that the slave got something out of it. Then I couldn’t accept that it was good for both of them that the master be killed – this seems contradictory – why would I want to spare the master if I exclusively identified with the slave?

In any case, I read the following passage over and over but for years I could not assimilate it:

“They must enter into this struggle, for they must bring their certainty of themselves to the level of objective truth, and make this a fact both in the case of the other and in their own case as well. And it is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; only thus is it tried and proved that the essential nature of self-consciousness is not bare existence, is not the merely immediate form in which it at first makes its appearance, is not its mere absorption in the expanse of life.”

Recently there was a scandal about phone-in competitions on British television being a con.

A spokesman said “If someone has been encouraged to call in and take part in a competition that there is no possibility of them winning then that, in my view, is fraud and the police should be brought in."

The big con, the big fraud. We are all forced to take part in a competition that there is no possibility of winning.

Richard Dawkins: “Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators."

homogenising template

Zizek - "My big worry is not to be ignored but to be accepted".

Slavoj Zizek was on French television the night before last! Or at least, a video clip of him, speaking French. He said that ‘old school’ French intellectuals like Badiou reach a wider English-speaking audience than the “new school”, including Bernard Henri-Levy (oops, that’s Bernard-Henri Lévy), present in the studio. BHL said Badiou’s voice has been totally silent on big issues (Kosovo). Irrespective of his personal karma, BHL spoke convincingly, suggesting the West use the Olympics as leverage to put pressure on China to stop buying oil from the Sudan. He reminded us that while we are discussing the French Presidential Elections, in Darfur there is a huge population being excluded from history, who have no state at all.

Zizek intrigues me. I sometimes wonder whether to take him seriously or not, but it doesn’t occur to me to wonder how rich he is. There is no big Other who has all the answers, we have to learn to think for ourselves. With BHL, the silver spoon seems to taint his discourse, or, rather, my ears. Whatever he says I am not really listening, because I am looking at him and imagining his discourse to mean “just because I am filthy rich doesn’t mean we can’t all be equal without me giving up any of my wealth”. In contrast to “God is dead but my hair is perfect” Lévy, I remember how exciting it was recently to watch Arianne Mnouchkine in an interview, and thinking how impressive she was spiritually, how her appearance did not draw attention to itself and stop her message from getting across.

Rwanda came and Rwanda went. Darfur is here. How can we be so aware of a situation and yet not be able to affect it?

I google Darfur, come across a number of sites where I can sign a petition and make a donation. Is that it? Once again do = pay. If you can’t pay you can’t do anything. Yet if you can pay, that is all you can do. You can’t even be sure that your money will make it to destination. I click on a link called “Darfur crisis: How to help”- the date is July 2004. I wonder how many children have died since then. How many inconsolable mothers?

At the opposite end of the smotherlove scale, Lionel Shriver’s “We have to talk about Kevin” comes to mind.

If I overcome my personal demons it won’t save Darfur. It won’t make the world a better place. But it won’t do anyone any harm either.

Walter Benjamin: “It is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it.”

At the moment I am more interested in what is not written than in what is written.

First of all because what is left out is often the very reason behind the writing, the thing that cannot be said or written about but that creates the compulsion to write. The thing that demands to be expressed indirectly.

Secondly, because saying too much makes writing unreadable, like loving too much makes life unliveable.

Rather than the words, any words, being a triumph over the silence of nothingness, it is this particular pattern of words that is a triumph over the homogenising template