October 01, 2014

La Voce (The Voice)
1916
Emilio Pettoruti
b. October 1, 1892

Eu son unha forasteira, sempre unha forasteira. I am a foreigner, always foreign. Loito nunha escuridade funxk,bel con toda outra escuridade. I struggle in a fungible and obscure darkness alongside every other kind of obscurity. Son unha forasteira con historia, con historias multiples, historias que nunca vivk,n. I am a foreigner with a history, with multiple histories, histories I never lived. Historias xenéticas, de xenética. Genetic histories, of genetics. Sempre sei que idioma uso. I always know what language I speak in. Imaxino sen imaxes, senón con temperaturas e luz e vagaridades que me pican no pel. I imagine without images, but with temperatures and light and wanderings that prickle and disturb my skin. Indescriptk,beis. Indescriptible. Postures with furniture. And I age, I am aging. Limits of the body and mind.

And the text. It is here before me, in front of me, the text. É e esti;. It is in itself, and it is sited in time/space. And me, awake. With coffee. Without glasses. Light. The form of the letters in front of me.

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“Funnily, the ones most likely to accept a notion of transparent transference between languages are those who are monolingual. And who thus must translate everything under very difficult circumstances: without any language of origin. To have a language of origin you need a language of arrival: without at least two languages, neither exists. There is just, ever, language. In such case, there is just, ever, one culture so absorbed in its structures that any one individual speaker cannot question and challenge many of its assumptions.”

- Erin Moure

(....)

Moure’s work dwells in the possible. In the changeable. It’s “being” in poetry. It’s also thinking in poetry. Even as I write this I can hear Erin Mouré interacting with my text: referring me to Deleuze, Char, Butler, joyfully expanding my thoughts on her work, correcting certain assumptions. In fact, every time I attempt to describe her work she shifts uncomfortably, albeit good naturedly, translating me into Galician, French even Mouré…the poem is never what you think it is, she says, “Human struggle is always sited in human bodies. Not in bodies as signifiers, but bodies as lived apparatuses”. The bodies of poems sit up and take notice. Each time they move they refresh themselves, “they recuperate but do not solve” ...(more)

bpNichol
b. September 30, 1944

Poem Without Ends
Alastair Reid
(1926 - 2014)

One cannot take the beginning out of the air
saying 'It is the time: the hour is here'.
The process is continuous as wind,
the bird observed, not rising, but in flight,
unrealised, in motion of the mind.

The end of everything is similar, never
actually happening, but always over.
The agony, the bent head, only tell
that already in the heart the innocent evening
is thick with the ferment of farewell.

Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer
b. September 30, 1865

Where Truth Lies

Alastair Reid
Maps, once made,
leave the impression of a place gone dead.

Words, once said,
anchor the fevers in the head.

Vows, once taken,
fade in the shadows of a place forsaken.

Oh, understand
how the mind's landscape forms from shifting sand,

how where we are
is partly solid ground, part head-in-air,

a twilit zone
where changing flesh and changeless ghost are one,

and what is true
lies between you and the idea of you -

a friction,
restless, between the fact and the fiction.

Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer

Paul Crowther bites the hands of both analytic and continental philosophical approaches to aesthetics. Whilst chewing he thinks about how post-modernism is linked to market forces and Supermodernity, about how civilising is organised round self restraint, about how Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze have created a distorting orthodoxy, about rejecting analytic philosophical approaches to art, about White Aesthetics, about post-analytic phenomenology, about phenomenological depth, about subject-object reciprocity, about meaning in abstract art, about Kant and German Idealism. Take this one neat and then go for a walk…
- Richard Marshall

(....)

The challenge to the realm of values presented by Supermodernity is colossal. As embodied beings, we exist in a world – both natural and cultural – that is rich, diverse, complex, and full of different aspects. However, Supermodernity violates this complexity. It is permeated by the cult of management that seeks to promote ‘efficiency’ by reducing everything to models of social interaction and outcomes derived from cybernetics and the advertising industry. What it is to be human, and what it is to change oneself and be encultured in a deep sense is lost. Indeed, the very notion of freedom itself is reduced to consumer choices. Of course, there has always been a difficult relation between money and civilization, but in most eras there was always a strong sense that some things were more important than money-power. Values of a moral and aesthetic nature, and such things as self-development and bettering oneself and one’s community, were acknowledged as things that had to be protected from market forces. This critical distance has been lost. And the intellectual relativisms of Supermodernity are not the slightest help in reconfiguring it, because they are complicit in the new market serfdom.

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Emilio Pettoruti