Some Thoughts on Narrative (Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places), Ursula K. LeGuin

 Surely the primary, survival-effective uses of language involve stating alternatives and hypotheses. We don’t, we never did, go about making statements of fact to other people, or in our internal discourse with ourselves. We talk about what may be, or what we’d like to do, or what you ought to do, or what might have happened: warnings, suppositions, propositions, invitations, ambiguities, analogies, hints, lists, anxieties, hearsay, old wives’ tales, leaps and cross-links and spiderwebs between here and there, between then and now, between now and sometime, a continual weaving and restructuring of the remembered and the perceived and the imagined, including a great deal of wishful thinking and a variable quantity of deliberate or non-deliberate fictionalizing, to reassure ourselves or for the pleasure of it, and also some deliberate or semi-deliberate falsification in order to mislead a rival or persuade a friend or escape despair; and no sooner have we made one of these patterns of words than we may, like Shelley’s cloud, laugh, and arise, and unbuild it again. 

In recent centuries we speakers of this lovely language have reduced the English verb almost entirely to the indicative mood. But beneath that specious and arrogant assumption of certainty all the ancient, cloudy, moody powers and options of the subjunctive remain in force. The indicative points its bony finger at primary experiences, at the Things; but it is the subjunctive that joins them, with the bonds of analogy, possibility, probability, contingency, contiguity, memory, desire, fear, and hope: the narrative connection. As J. T. Fraser puts it, moral choice, which is to say human freedom, is made possible “by language, which permits us to give accounts of possible and impossible worlds in the past, in the future, or in a faraway land.”

From The Production of Space

 The apparent translucency taken on by obscure historical and political forces in decline (the state, nationalism) can enlist images having their sources in the earth or in nature, in paternity or in maternity. The rational is thus naturalised, while nature cloaks itself in nostalgias which supplant rationalities.

Epigraph - The Production of Space. Henri Lefebvre

 Envoi

Imprisoned by four walls

(to the North, the crystal of non-knowledge

A landscape to be invented

To the South, reflective memory

To the East,  the mirror

The the West, stone and the song of silence)

I wrote messages, but received no reply.

Octavio Paz

Difference and Repetition

The repetition of a work of art is like a singularity without connect, and it is not by chance that a poem must be learned by heart. The head is the organ of exchange, but the heart is the amorous organ of repetition. ( It is true that repetition also concerns the head, but precisely because it is its terror or paradox.) Pius Servien rightly distinguished two languages: the language of science, dominated by the symbol of equality, in which each term may be replaced by others; and lyrical language, in which every term is irreplaceable and can only be repeated. Repetition can always be ‘represented’ as extreme resemblance or perfect equivalence, but the fact that one can pass by degrees from one thing to another does not prevent their being different in kind.

On the other hand, generality belongs to the order of laws. However law determines only the resemblance of subjects ruled by it, along with their equivalence to terms which it designates. Far from grounding repetition, law shows, rather, how repetition would remain impossible for pure subjects of law, particulars. It condemns them to change. As an empty form of difference, an invariable form of variation, a law compels its subjects to illustrate it only at the cost of their exchange. No doubt there are as many content as variables among the terms designated by laws, and a many permanences and preservations as there are flutes and variations in nature. However a preservation is still not a repetition. The constants of one law are in turn variables of a more general law, just as the hardest of rocks become soft and fluid matter on the geological scale of millions of years. So at each level, it is in relation to permanent large natural objects that the subject of law experiences its own powerlessness to repeat and discovers that this powerlessness is already contained in the object, reflected in the permanent object wherein it sees itself condemned. Law unites the change of water and the permanence of the river. Elie Faure said of Watteau: ‘ He imbued with the utmost transitoriness those things which our gaze encounters vas the most enduring, namely space and forests.’ This is the eighteenth century method. Wolmar, in La Nouvelle Héloïse, made a system of it: the impossibility of repetition, and change as a condition to which all particular creatures are subject by the law of Nature, were understood in relation to fixed terms ( themselves no doubt, variables in relation to other permanences and in function of other, more general laws). This is the meaning of the grove, the grotto and the ‘sacred’ object.      ………

If repetition exists, it expresses at once a singularity opposed to the general, a universality opposed to the particular, a distinctive as opposed to the ordinary, an instanteinity opposed to variation and an eternity opposed to permanence. In every respect, repetition s a transgression. It puts law into question, it denounces its nominal or general character in favour of a more profound and more artistic reality.

From  Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

(Excerpt) The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll

Fit the Second

                      The Bellman's Speech

The Bellman himself they all praised to the skies—

   Such a carriage, such ease and such grace!

Such solemnity, too! One could see he was wise,

   The moment one looked in his face!

He had bought a large map representing the sea,

   Without the least vestige of land:

And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be

   A map they could all understand.

"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,

   Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"

So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply

   "They are merely conventional signs!

"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!

   But we've got our brave Captain to thank

(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best—

   A perfect and absolute blank!"

This was charming, no doubt; but they shortly found out

   That the Captain they trusted so well

Had only one notion for crossing the ocean,

   And that was to tingle his bell.

He was thoughtful and grave—but the orders he gave

   Were enough to bewilder a crew.

When he cried "Steer to starboard, but keep her head larboard!"

   What on earth was the helmsman to do?

Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes:

   A thing, as the Bellman remarked,

That frequently happens in tropical climes,

   When a vessel is, so to speak, "snarked."

But the principal failing occurred in the sailing,

   And the Bellman, perplexed and distressed,

Said he had hoped, at least, when the wind blew due East,

   That the ship would not travel due West! 

The Telling, Ursula Le Guin

 “God is Reason, yes,” he said, rather uncertainly. 

“Well, on Terra, the word has been an enormously important one for thousands of years, among many peoples. And usually it doesn’t refer so much to what’s reasonable as to what’s mysterious. What can’t be understood. So there are all kinds of ideas of God. One is that God is an entity that created everything else and is responsible for everything that exists and happens. Like a kind of universal, eternal Corporation.” 

He looked intent but puzzled. 

“Where I grew up, in the village, we knew about that kind of God, but we had a lot of other kinds. Local ones. A great many of them. They all were each other, though, really. There were some great ones, but I didn’t know much about them as a child. Only from my name. Aunty explained my name to me once. I asked, ‘Why am I Sutty?’ And she said, ‘Sutty was God’s wife.’ And I asked, ‘Am I Ganesh’s wife?’ Because Ganesh was the God I knew best, and I liked him. But she said, ‘No, Shiva’s.’

 “All I knew about Shiva then was that he has a lovely white bull that’s his friend. And he has long, dirty hair and he’s the greatest dancer in the universe. He dances the worlds into being and out of being. He’s very strange and ugly and he’s always fasting. Aunty told me that Sutty loved him so much that she married him against her father’s will. I knew that was hard for a girl to do in those days, and I thought she was very brave. But then Aunty told me that Sutty went back to see her father. And her father talked insultingly about Shiva and was extremely rude to him. And Sutty was so angry and ashamed that she died of it. She didn’t do anything, she just died. And ever since then, faithful wives who die when their husbands die are called after her. Well, when Aunty told me that, I said, ‘Why did you name me for a stupid silly woman like that!’ 

“And Uncle was listening, and he said, ‘Because Sati is Shiva, and Shiva is Sati. You are the lover and the griever. You are the anger. You are the dance.’ 

“So I decided if I had to be Sutty, it was all right, so long as I could be Shiva too. . . .” 

She looked at Yara. He was absorbed and utterly bewildered.

El Tim, Lucia Berlin

 The nuns laughed in the grade school, and the children laughed. The nuns were all old, not like tired old women who clutch their bags at a bus stop, but proud, loved by their God and by their children. They responded to love with tenderness, with soft laughter that was contained, guarded, behind the heavy wooden doors. 

Several junior high nuns swept through the playground, checking for cigarette smoke. These nuns were young and nervous. They taught “underprivileged children,” “borderline delinquents,” and their thin faces were tired, sick of a blank stare. They could not use awe or love like the grade school nuns. Their recourse was impregnability, indifference to the students who were their duty and their life.

(A Manual for Cleaning Women)

The Adventure of a Photographer, Italo Calvino

 He freed himself from the cloth and straightened up again. He was doing it all wrong, from the beginning. That expression, that accent, that secret he seemed on the very point of capturing in her face was something that drew him into the quicksands of moods, humors, psychology: he too was one of those who pursue life as it flees, a hunter of the unattainable, like the takers of snapshots. He had to follow the opposite path: aim at a portrait completely on the surface, evident, unequivocal, that did not elude conventional appearance, the stereotype, the mask. The mask, being first of all a social, historical product, contains more truth than any image claiming to be “true”; it bears a quantity of meanings that will gradually be revealed. Wasn’t this precisely Antonino’s intention in setting up this fair-stall of a studio?

.

.

(and also)

.

.

In Antonino’s dark-room, strung with films and proofs, Bice peered from every frame, as thousands of bees peer out of the honeycomb of a hive, always the same bee: Bice in every attitude, at every angle, in every guise; Bice posed or caught unawares, an identity fragmented into a powder of images. “But what’s this obsession with Bice? Can’t you photograph anything else?” was the question he heard constantly from his friends, and also from her. “It isn’t just a matter of Bice,” he answered. “It’s a question of method. Whatever person you decide to photograph, or whatever thing, you must go on photographing it always, exclusively, at every hour of the day and night. Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images.” But he didn’t say what meant most to him: to catch Bice in the street when she didn’t know he was watching her, to keep her within the range of hidden lenses, to photograph her not only without letting himself be seen but without seeing her, to surprise her as she was in the absence of his gaze, of any gaze. Not that he wanted to discover any particular thing; he wasn’t a jealous man in the usual sense of the word. It was an invisible Bice that he wanted to possess, a Bice absolutely alone, a Bice whose presence presupposed the absence of him and everyone else.

(Difficult Loves and Other Stories)

Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky

 You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there's no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man's nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots. Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives. I suspect, gentlemen, that you are looking at me with compassion; you tell me again that an enlightened and developed man, such, in short, as the future man will be, cannot consciously desire anything disadvantageous to himself, that that can be proved mathematically. I thoroughly agree, it can—by mathematics. But I repeat for the hundredth time, there is one case, one only, when man may consciously, purposely, desire what is injurious to himself, what is stupid, very stupid—simply in order to have the right to desire for himself even what is very stupid and not to be bound by an obligation to desire only what is sensible. Of course, this very stupid thing, this caprice of ours, may be in reality, gentlemen, more advantageous for us than anything else on earth, especially in certain cases. And in particular it may be more advantageous than any advantage even when it does us obvious harm, and contradicts the soundest conclusions of our reason concerning our advantage—for in any circumstances it preserves for us what is most precious and most important—that is, our personality, our individuality.

(White Nights and Other Stories)

Georgia O'Keeffe, Joan Didion

The city men. The men. They. The words crop up again and again as this astonishingly aggressive woman tells us what was on her mind when she was making her astonishingly aggressive paintings. It was those city men who stood accused of sentimentalizing her flowers: “I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don’t.” And I don’t. Imagine those words spoken, and the sound you hear is don’t tread on me. “The men” believed it impossible to paint New York, so Georgia O’Keeffe painted New York. “The men” didn’t think much of her bright color, so she made it brighter. The men yearned toward Europe so she went to Texas, and then New Mexico.

(The White Album)

Rootprints - Hele Cixous

The word ‘entredeux’: it is a word I used recently in Déluge to designate a true in-between—between a life which is ending and a life which is beginning. For me, an entredeux is: nothing. It w, because there is entredeux. But it is—I will go through metaphors—a moment in a life where you are not entirely living, where you are almost dead. Where you are not dead. Where you are not yet in the process of reliving. These are the innumerable moments that touch us with bereavements of all sorts. Either there is bereavement between me, violently, from the loss of a being who is a part of me—as if a piece of my body, of my house, were ruined, collapsed. Or, for example, the bereavement that the appearance of a grave illness in oneself must be. Everything that makes the course of life be interrupted. In this case we find ourself in a situation for which we are absolutely not prepared. Human beings are equipped for daily life, with its rites, with its closure, its commodities, its furniture. When an event arrives which evicts us from ourselves, we do not know how to ‘live’. But we must. Thus we are launched into a space-time whose coordinates are all different from those we have always been accustomed to. In addition, these violent situations are always new. Always. At no moment can a previous bereavement serve as a model. It is, frightfully, all new: this is one of the most important experiences of our human histories. At times we are thrown into strangeness. This being abroad at home is what I call an entredeux.