October 06, 2014

La plage des CallotsBernard Buffetd. October 4, 1999

End of Summer Stanley Kunitz 1905 - 2006 An agitation of the air, A perturbation of the light Admonished me the unloved year Would turn on its hinge that night. I stood in the disenchanted field Amid the stubble and the stones, Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me The song of my marrow-bones. Blue poured into summer blue, A hawk broke from his cloudless tower, the roof of the silo blazed, and I knew that part of my life was over. Already the iron door of the north Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows Order their population forth, And a cruel wind blows.

The MonumentElizabeth Bishop d. October 6, 1979

It is an artifact of wood. Wood holds together better than sea or cloud or and could by itself, much better than real sea or sand or cloud. It chose that way to grow and not to move. The monument's an object, yet those decorations, carelessly nailed, looking like nothing at all, give it away as having life, and wishing; wanting to be a monument, to cherish something. The crudest scroll-work says "commemorate," while once each day the light goes around it like a prowling animal, or the rain falls on it, or the wind blows into it. It may be solid, may be hollow. The bones of the artist-prince may be inside or far away on even drier soil. But roughly but adequately it can shelter what is within (which after all cannot have been intended to be seen). It is the beginning of a painting, a piece of sculpture, or poem, or monument, and all of wood. Watch it closely.

WindowsLinda Bierds

When the cow died by the green sapling, her limp udder splayed on the grass like something from the sea, we offered our words in their low calibrations— which was our fashion—then severed her horns with a pug-toothed blade and pounded them out to an amber transparency, two sheets that became, in their moth-wing haze, our parlor windows. They softened our guests with the gauze-light of the Scriptures, and rendered to us, on our merriest days, the sensation of gazing through the feet of a gander. In time we moved up to the status of glass—one pane, then two—each cupping in proof of its purity a dimple of fault, a form of distortion enhancing our image. We took the panes with us from cottage to cottage, moth-horn and glass, and wedged up the misfitted gaps with a poultice of gunny and wax.

salt cellarBernard Buffet

Conversation strives toward silence, and the listener is really the silent partner. The speaker receives meaning from him; the silent one is the unappropriated source of meaning. The conversation raises words to his lips as do vessels, jugs. The speaker immerses the memory of his strength in words and seeks forms in which the listener can reveal himself. For the speaker speaks in order to let himself be converted. He understands the listener despite the flow of his own speech; he realizes that he is addressing someone whose features are inexhaustibly earnest and good, whereas he, the speaker, blasphemes against language. But even if he revives an empty past through orgiastic excitement, the listener hears not words but the silence of the present. For despite the flight of spirit and the emptiness of words, the speaker is present; his face is open to the listener, and the efforts made by his lips are visible. The listener holds true language in readiness; the words enter him, and at the same time he sees the speaker. Whoever speaks enters the listener. Silence, then, is born from the conversation. Every great man has only one conversation, at whose margins a silent greatness waits. In the silence, energy was renewed; the listener led the conversation to the edge of language, and the speaker creates the silence of a new language, he, its first auditor. Silence is the internal frontier of conversation.............. The Metaphysics of Youth Walter BenjaminSelected Writings Vol.1, 1913-1926 Ed. Marcus Bullock, Michael W. Jennings google books

Nature Morte Au HibouBernard Buffet

Textual Communities: Nancy, Blanchot, Derrida. Kuisma KorhonenCulture Machine, Vol 8 (2006)

VI From the reader's point of view, nothing in the text itself reveals whether the one who once wrote it is dead or alive. By writing, we inscribe ourselves into a sphere where the living and the dead are co-equal; moreover, according to a long tradition, reading is a conversation with the dead. We may even claim, like Jean Genet once did, that not only can we read sentences that are written by dead authors ' by writing we move, in a way, already into a world where we can respond to the voices of the dead. Or, perhaps, the very fact that we cannot answer in this life to those who are on the other side renders the twofold imperative of responsibility ' to carry responsibility for the other and to respond to the other ' even more urgent and calls us to imagine another world, a fictive world where communication has no limits, and where other minds become transparent to the eyes of the narrator. As writers, we join the dead. As soon as we have written our words down, they cease to be ours, they become words of someone who is no longer here, who has already crossed the line and moved to the other side. In writing, we face the past ' my past, our past, and the past of those who I never knew. Part of the author's responsibility is to answer also for those who did not write, who did not leave documents or other official traces; who, in the maelstroms of history, were marginalized, silenced or killed. It is part of the author's responsibility to listen to how the wind cries and how the stones weep for those who are no longer here, not even as traces. And perhaps for those, too, who have never been alive. The text itself does not necessarily reveal whether the characters that are represented in it have ever been real or not. Of course, there are textual conventions that suggest that the text is meant to be read as fiction; and we do necessarily hold some previous knowledge of the world that suggests to us whether it is probable that these kind of events can take place in our real world or not. But as Hayden White has argued, the techniques of description, figuration and emplotment are not so different in fiction and non-fiction as we would like to believe. Or, as Ricouer put it, history consists of more or less fictionalized narratives of the past, whereas fiction is more or less historicized imagination. We may also claim that literature challenges the limits between human and non-human communities. Fiction (such as myths) may take us to the world of animals and help us to imagine other kinds of living forms. By reading, we are already confronting something that is necessarily on the limits of the living presence of other humans: language as such is both the living energy of living human beings and more or less inhuman structures that can be stored, reproduced and even generated by machines. What we ultimately encounter in literature is not the author (the author is, by definition, no longer present) or the world full of different beings (they are, after all, only textual constructions, although we cannot help but imagine some kind of existence for them in our reading experience), but the very materiality of language, the 'il y a' or the 'murmur of the world' (Lingis, 1994), the white noise of being that we hear when all meanings have been stripped from words. Textual communities are thus communities that are capable of transgressing limits between life and death, existence and non-existence. Textual communities are formed by the living, the dead, the human, the non-human and imaginary beings.