Self images

It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer. Virginia Woolf

When I was a child I lived, for a time, in a small village on the west coast of Vancover Island. It is situated at the end of an islet with high mountains on either side. The next village was a four hour drive on a rough and dangerous logging road, and we did not go often, so it felt as if we inhabited our own enclosed little world. A world bordered by tree covered slopes, the fog an inland swamp. The village had a co-op with groceries, rubber boots and fishing tackle, a school, a cinema that charged a dollar for the Saturday matinee, a United church that burned down one Christmas, and a small gift shop with cheap cut glass and homemade greeting cards made of pressed flowers and ferns.  My father worked in construction and took frequent excursions out to the dump on the outskirts of town. He would usually return from the dump with more than he went with. My mother would sigh with exasperation when his truck pulled into the driveway, loaded down with old window frames, lighting fixtures and the occasional appliance, all of which would find temporary residence in his shop until one day he would haul it back out the dump to make room for new finds. On Sundays my sister, brother and I would often accompany him. We would sit on the warm hood of the pick up and watch him scavange alongside an extended family of black bears. They were so used to his presence that they would barely pause in their dining at the smorgasbord when we pulled up next to the pit. Occassionally, however, a young, curious bear, his snout probing the air, would amble his way in the direction of where we sat. We would kick our heels against the metal hood, raise a ruckus, my father would shout, and the bear would quickly retreat. One afternoon we arrived to find a large, round mirror leaning on a log as if it were part of the bears’ household furnishings. It had been poorly made for it had a distinct warp down the middle. My father, unable to pass up a free “circus” mirror, brought it home, and a year or so later when we moved to another small island town he mounted it on the wall of the bathroom. Despite, or perhaps because of, the distortion, whenever I looked into it I saw a young, curious black bear.

Food for thought

“Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings." Dali

I was walking along Mt Royal the other evening when I happened to spot a former professor of mine eating at Subway. I was mildly surprised to see him consume the processed sandwich meats, wilted iceberg lettuce and white bread. The restaurant chain with its hard plastic seating  and oh-so-ordinary comestibles  do not seem ambitious or cerebral enough to satisfy such a formidable mind.  A block later as I was passing beneath a stand of trees the head of a baby bird fell to my feet. I was struck by the temporal proximity of these two events.  Such potential for metaphor.

Missed Connections- Sunday, December 12th

"love is not a victory march, it's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah" Cohen

I was the chix sitting right in front of you
estoy en casa, estoy borracha (un poquito, pero…),
with laptop/big coffee. I dunno why,
ojalá estuvieras aquí.
you looked nice and all into you’re stuff,
alguna chica que no quiera pasar los dias
I wanted to talk to you but I didn’t wanna look too weird
en soledad al igual que yo?
or disturb you. I was there between 17-19hrs or something like that. 

Hit me up.

I usually imagine us a missed connection
après toutes ces années,
the last time i did my laundry i found two socks that didn’t belong to me
je me demande si nous pourrions entrer en contact?
because we never really connected in a way that both of us needed
alors, est que nous sommes de parfaits idiots
one was orange, the other one was gray with purple stripes
living with regret.

Why you are looking at missed connections? Do you secretly wish to be missed?

My guilty pleasure of late, along with an unhealthy obsession for the wikileaks story, is reading craigslist missed encounters. I don’t look for signs of myself there, nor do I leave any, but I find the signs of others, the signs they make in looking for an other, intriguing. ‘Love is a metaphor’, a substitution for an impossible desire.  It offers the protection of fantasy when negotiating ordinary loss or a structural impasse in the possibility of a genuine intersubjective relationship.  Love is what occurs when the love object is necessarily, and forever unavailable. Love is a “specular mirage” that fosters a delusional sense of reciprocity. Or so, suggests Lacan. I don’t share the psychoanalyst’s skepticism for love, but I like to think of it as a metaphor. It is in many ways the name we give the jumble of feelings that correspond, contradict, cause conflict, and even potentially joy when we wade into its waters. Love never comes down to one singular feeling; it is an unpredictable, unruly, and sometimes scary ragout of thoughts, pre-thoughts and memory. It is holds forth an archive of desires that we only half know or acknowledge.  It allows us the illusion to see what the eye never can, say what forever remains beyond the reach of the tongue, that pure expression of desire.  This is how I read craigslist missed encounters. hopes that seem almost arbitrary, dreams misplaced, desperate pleas, notes of anguish, tearful laments, coffee dates at Starbucks, intrigue and lost socks. It has it all, the fear, the ecstasy, the anxiety, the melancholy, the beautiful and the ugly.  The internet, of course, facilitates desire, even proliferates it by its very nature.  It is an intimate public sphere that allows for virtual interaction and the circumvention of the messiness of physical contact.  Abstract sex.  As such, it seems to serve as a metaphor for the metaphor.  It pushes that metonymic slippage one step further, where being is not only a pursuit, but the figure of speech that serves as an allegory for that pursuit.

 

Insipid phlegm

for her, beauty was a stale concept.

I have been quite negligent in regards to this blog of late.  I suppose I could trot out the usual excuses, oh say, work, children, studies, laundry and an insatiable itch that cannot be scratched, but really laziness would be closer to the mark.  I have indulged in great indolence lately, with no regrets.  Afternoons spent reading smut, evenings talking nonsense, nights of dreamless sleep.  Do I lament, repent, plead for  exoneration? Not at all.  Life is to be squandered as Max once said.  Words, I have, of late, taken to heart.  By chance I happened upon my blog this afternoon.  It has been some time since I checked up on its maldevelopment (or perhaps, to be more honest, it was some momentary boredom that drove me here this auspicious day), and much to my delight I found that a visitor today accessed this small plot of cyberspace by typing in the words “insipid phlegm”.  Suddenly all my efforts feel vindicated.  Not a word has been wasted, nor breath out of place or a syntactical blunder wound without purpose.  I am legitimate!  Oh, to be insipid, drab, dry and pointless.  To write in spiritless, tedious, vapid and wearisome prose!  To evoke that thick viscous substance secreted by the mucous membranes of some enlightened respiratory passages!  I am redeemed and ask for little more

Home Remedies

"Alone and filled with care, I go measuring the most deserted fields with steps delaying and slow" Petrarch

Alison’s salt cure for the envy of placid beasts

When the pure presence of anxiety in the form of an agile grimace nips at your heels like a mangy dog and silence is inhabited by the monstrous swarm that surrounds and deafens take an  irregular cloth and rub your flesh until it is warm and disturbed.  Use salt that has been dried in the oven with saltpeter and spices to quell any secret rapture of hideous nakedness and the monstrous shapes of delirious animals that betray dark rage.  Lay on a wooden table, splayed like a carcass, and allow one’s ego to be beaten and pressed by the knowledge that any suffering from the shadow of loss is merely the narcissistic wound of abandonment.  Biting cares, perturbations and passions, sorrows, and foaming should let off with the application of the salt mixture.  Stoke the fire, and remain in a hot room for 3 days.  This should suture the conceptual hole and lessen the horror vacuus.  Turn over once a day.  At the end of 3 days transfer one’s self to a cold cellar and apply a little extra salt.  The cellar should be disinfected, else the many-headed beast will rear once again and discontents, discords and treacheries will return.  Remained sealed in the cold room until any chafing, cursing, and pathetical adjuncts dissipate.  If one’s eyes are still grisly to behold, skin ashen to unfold, and the horrible fear of existence persists upon ascend, repeat the treatment.

And these few words

 

 

"We talk because we are mortal:/ words are not signs, they are years./ Saying what they say,/ the words we are saying/ say time: they name us./ We are time's names. / To talk is human." Octavio Paz

So much has been written on the subject of identity in recent years that I hesitate to broach the topic. But the question of what constitutes selfhood is one that has occupied my thoughts over the years a great deal. It has, of course, provided fodder for writers and academics alike for time immemorial, yet it remains an open question, an enigma that can never be resolved. Most recently thought has seized on the concept of identity as being something fluid, something that is modified, renovated, and rescripted with the accumulation of new experiences in the material world. While I do not refute this understanding, it has long been my belief that identity is essentially unstable, I have some hesitation in accepting the implied premise that identity is merely a potage of experience, desire, memory, and imagination. The question that arises is one that addresses what we might call the essence of a self. Can we claim that there is some fundamental nature that functions to give a framework to a selfhood? If so, how do we define it? How do we even recognize it?

I want to begin this discussion by suggesting that identity is largely formulated through language with the means and ends being a desire to compose a narrative that has a plot. As such, the construction of identity can be understood as a literary event. We perceive and understand the world and ourselves by way of a narrative that involves the organization of experience into a temporal succession. We seek cause and effect, beginnings and conclusions, motives and operations as ways of moulding the raw stuff of life into something comprehensible. Desire as such, is integral to the process of sense-making. It is what drives us forward and onward and functions as the motor of actions. This assertion is complicated by the psychoanalytical understanding that desire is inherently unsatisfiable and linked to memories that are inaccessible to the consciousness. Thus our desire for significance and narrative is one that arises from the unconscious and phantasmic scenarios of satisfaction. As intriguing as this proposal is, it offers little in the way of helping us identify some core of a selfhood. Are we to understand identity as something that arises from the reproduction of infantile need and quest for gratification? I would hope not. Such a proposition seems to reduce the complexity of the human to early childhood experiences with little regard for the roles of imagination, emotion, individuality, potentiality and affect in the construction of identity. It disregards the accumulation and impurity of experience. We are in continual contact and interaction with the material world, shaping and being shaped by language, tools, and the geography in which we live. Thus, to assert the concrete cornerstone of character is largely borne of infantile experience neglects the potentiality, the possibilities of one’s own existence. It seems to crystallize identity and designate it as something that lies within, but always out of the reach of consciousness. It cements character while positioning it outside of one’s control. This is an unsatisfactory model of character for a number of reasons, primarily, as mentioned earlier, it negates the possibility of experience having an indelible effect on one’s selfhood. Surely traumatic events leave some residue upon one’s character that cannot be reduced to a psychoanalytical model that focuses on infancy. What I am suggesting is that affect, that is the experience and repetition of sensation and action, surpasses and undermines what we often regard as identity while supporting, energizing. and containing it. Paradoxical to be sure, but it is in our interactions, our desire for sense-making, our search for meaning and individuality that the notion of identity is challenged and defined. This seems to lead us back to my initial discomfiture with selfhood defined as a hodgepodge of beliefs, experience and drive for wish fulfillment, yet I want to suggest that this discussion has not been entirely a fool’s errand, that some understandings have arisen. The first is that identity is under constant construction, it is not something cemented in early life experiences with little interaction or malleability, nor is it the sum total of encounters with the world. Identity seems to reside within the vocabulary, the syntax in which we use to narrate our movement through the world. Language facilitates the composition of identity, yet it extends beyond any one individual, entering what we might call the realm of the non-human. It relies on the human to exist, yet it surpasses the human in its timelessness and endless potentiality. What I would like to suggest is that identity is an intersection between language, affect, and desire. That our relationship with words and syntax, our movement through the material world, and our desire for narrative and sense-making are the primary constituents of what we might regard as selfhood. Thus the framework upon which the essence of selfhood rests is one that is build out of one’s familiarity and use of language. We are the language we speak. Just a few, scattered thoughts on this Sunday afternoon.

Home Remedies

 

 

 

  

"It is singular to see that man's greatest desire, which is his personal liberty, has its disadvantages as well." Spurzheim

 

Alison’s salt cure for maladie anglais

Begin treatment by scraping, preferably with a mussel shell, the surfaces of one’s body. This will dispose the running sores caused by the promiscuity of the soul more readily toward treatment. Apply French salt liberally. To abate fermentation of flesh and decomposition of morals one must avoid confined spaces, particularly those situated underground, and seek the sun. It is recommended that one lie on a wooden form for at least 4 hours after initial salting. This will aid in the neutralization of tainted exhalations and any putrid fevers. The application of dried calve skin and river stones on the chest and torso will relieve the effects of irresolute attention and a vacillating soul. Wash well with fresh water to cleanse one of the longing to suffer and dissolve the friable alkaline particles that penetrate body and heart. The mind disturbed by the search for truth will should find some comfort in the binding of the body. If disputes of unreason and passions of obstinacy continue, the best course of action is to be stamped on by a youth of 15 years or thereabout for an extended period of time. It is well known that shame fetters turpitude. Avoid shadowy places and darkened mirrors for 40 days.

 

I don’t know why she swallowed a fly

 

 

 

 

 

"This octave of faulty/ decorum hides the extraordinary lizard till night-fall," Moore

 

The question put to me on a daily basis by my 10 year old child generally revolves around the query, “what is your favourite animal?” A variation, if not a departure from the general theme, is ”if you were an animal, what would you be?” And most recently, “which animal do you feel most sorry for?”  I have learned over time that there are more, and less, appropriate answers to these questions. For instance, it is considered absolutely unacceptable to wish to be a housefly, unless one is willing to face a mob of irate 8-10 year olds and their little webs of reasoning and feelings.  Nor is it adequate to name paramecium or amoebas as one’s favourite animal. There seems to be a distinct bias toward multi-celled organisms with fur and large, doleful eyes.  Last weekend I was faced with two indignant children accusing me of cold-heartedness when I said I do not feel sorry for any animal. “But what about the polar bears?” protested my daughter, “or the dolphins? or the cats that get run over by cars?” I suppose I should have humoured her and said pandas or gorillas, but the question of empathy and intelligence with has been on my mind a great deal lately. I could not offer her a simple, thoughtless answer. The idea that we have the ability to know an animal, know enough of its consciousness to conceive how it might feel in any given situation is questionable.  This is not to mean that I condone cruelty to animals, but rather I deliberate on our capacity to do what empathy seems to demand, that of stepping into another’s shoes, so to speak, for an animal.  Other than the salient fact that animals don’t wear shoes, there is the issue of “knowing” a reality or world that exists in a different time and space than ours.  To disengage from the reality in which one lives and enter into some more “natural” world where living is simpler is not only a fool’s errand, it fails recognize the complexity, the diversity, and fullness of animal life. It hovers on a type of anthropocentrism, or the very least, a sort of “petishism” in which we look at animals as reflections of our ideal selves. It seems to me to deny the level of calculation and deliberation necessary to sustain life for any entity. We cannot live or think like lions, because we do not live with the same relation to space and time as they do. We may observe them, interact with them, admire them, but their relation with the world is radically different. They do not move through the world in same way we do. To claim to “think” like an animal, or even authentically empathize with one, is to neglect not only the complexity of their world, but to practice a sort of self-deception.  Our thoughts, and the way in which we direct, moderate or express emotion are dependent on language and culture.  The way in which we interact with the world, has evolved as a response to the world in which we live in, and as social beings, we have developed a high levels of emotional complexity and means of communication. These allow us to infer, to create choices, alternatives to merely acting on the drive for self-preservation. This is not to claim animals do not have the intelligence to make choices, but rather we are not as occupied with the things at hand, such as the hunt for sustenance or the hunter’s rifle.  We examine, reflect and conjecture.

Thrift offers an intriguing theory that suggests that there is no real distinction between various forms of matter. That everything, biology, geology, even things have a sort of intelligence. He argues that all things have an awareness of the world that is the result of a continual interaction with it. A tool will be as shaped by the hands that use it, as the hands will be moulded by the instrument. Everything responds to the material world in which it is situated. We are as subject to the geography we live in, the tools we use, and the living entities we encounter, as they are to us. Everything is so interwoven, so inextricably connected that it is impossible to separate intelligences. Intelligence is not the property of one entity, human or otherwise, but rather something that arises out of the relationship between an entity and its environment. This takes place in a world that is in a constant state of flux. He argues that there are so many new levels of intelligence and perceptual capacities that come with the technological advances of recent history that we can no longer distinguish between what what is human, animal or technology.  Everything is becoming so much more intertwined and related, that new planes of intelligence, more complex entities, and unexpected connections are emerging.  Living among a myriad of intelligences and potential interactions that unite living things creates a kind of ”boosted bare life.” In a series of becoming-worlds identity and a ’grounded’ existence becomes increasingly mediated and complex, we become almost “flecks of identity.” A smudge on one plane of the world like that of a swatted housefly on a kitchen window. All of this offers little in the way of a proper response to a 10 year old who has simply asked for preference in regards to an animal. I am not sure how I will answer her tomorrow, perhaps with “the spider that just swallowed a fly.”

 

 

 

I feel therefore I am

 

"Poetry is the music of the soul, and, above all, of great and feeling souls." Voltaire

I have long been interested in the role of affect in the literary aesthetic experience; that is, the way in which an emotional experience allows for meaning to rise from the relations between a reader and a text. I believe that affect is deeply embedded in language and literary form, yet because of its slippery nature, its refusal to be pinned down and assigned one stable definition, it is largely ignored by the humanities. This oversight is also the result of the western world’s privileging cognition over emotion, and I think the dichotomy of cognition and emotion is a western construct and must be interrogated. Western academic writing has long held the position of being disinterested, or sceptical, thus muting affect, but I cannot help but to question this stance and wonder about the implicit losses. By understanding affect as a way in which people relate to the world, as type of intelligence, we open up new understandings, new possibilities, of the manners in which we interact with literature.

Nigel Thrift in his immensely interesting book, “Non-Representational Theory” suggests affect is crucial in the cultural construction of the relationship between the individual and society, thus having political, cultural and social implications. I suggest it is also a highly gendered issue. Affect has an important and unacknowledged mediating position for research concerning gender, culture, and language.   Women’s communicative style is often labelled as being more affect-laden, allowing for the socialization of women to engage in “emotion management” and be shunted toward low-status service employment where positive affective displays are valued and access to power and economic resources are limited. But what does this imply for literary studies?  Are texts by women writers read and interpreted differently?  Do women readers interact with text more emotionally?  Or would any perceived discrepancies be the consequences of a relationship between women and literature that is fraught with complexities and contradictions.  It would be interesting to trace and map women’s interactions within literary tradition with an eye on the role of affect.  I think of the long withstanding sense of alarm regarding ‘silly women’s” novels and the potential threats to women that romance novels  are perceived to have.  The soft and impressionable condition of women’s minds are so much more vulnerable to the dis-ease of romantic notions and ideals.  Only a woman can confuse reality and reason with fantasy and respond irrationally.   

Affect is something that permeates all levels of linguistic and communicative structures, yet it is routinely shuttled to the sidelines as irrelevant and irrational. To be sure, affect is often irrational, and it is difficult to make qualitative statements about, but it is something that floods linguistic form (think of synecdoche, metonymy, metaphors, deviant stress patterns, and phonological statements as specifically ‘designed’ to invoke an emotional response in the reader). It is what allows for a text to provoke aesthetic feeling, and to be expressive in an abundant and vibrant way. It is what enables us to “sing” a poem. It is what gives us the capacity to engage in the constant process of becoming (Deleuze). It has the potential to”pierce” social interpretations and expectations, scrambling both and offering a threshold from which to envision and enact social transformation. As it traverses the public and private, biology and philosophy, yet remains a ”vital element of a body’s apprehension of the world” (Thrift), it is explicitly political.

Home Remedies

"and I bring her at last my heart to devour." Orestes

Alison’s salt cure for melancholia

 On no account wash with water before treatment. Take 2 lbs of uncommon kitchen salt, 1/2 lb of demerara sugar, 1/2 teaspoon of saltpetre and a dash of pepper. Mix well and rub vigourously over flesh.  Press, and allow to dry. Reside in a warm, moistureless, and defungaled room for 7 days. Eccentricity of appetite should shortly cease, but continue to avoid all seafood, especially beaver, sea otter, porpoise, and whale. One’s brain marrow should begin to stiffen and re-solidify, allowing for the impotent jostling of nerves and the feeble agitation of spirit to be placated. The effects of chronic irresolution will be diminished somewhat as the cold and dry temperament of the melancholic humour begins to be warmed, but natural clarity and subtlety will only be restored once one recognizes the agent responsible for each struggle of ambivalence, and begins to discern the structure of the cause of this defective state of the brain. The diminishment the quantity of spirits, and the strong and persistent imagination that lingers immoderately in the shadow with the shade, will be addressed as the acidity of the brain fluids is lessened, and chemical balance restored. Expulsion of insipid phlegm will cease. As blood and humours are carried to the brain in a more temperate and uniform manner, violent and impetuous movement or the slow languor of inertia, will desist. This should allow for the spirits that have thus languished on trails, frustrated by their own ineffectuality, to find opened or marked pathways that will eventually allow for noble thoughts and actions. If the feverless delirium and gray fixation persist beyond treatment, then I am afraid chances of recovery are slight.