dorveille (II)
I had to take After Writing back to the library, so these are transcriptions I hurriedly jotted in my notebook. With my crappy handwriting. This, here, is the epigraph for the book, which I love:
“In the struggle for time, state and art must destroy each other since the state wishes to stop the flow of time, while art would drift in it.” -Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption
Ok, here we go.
“As Genette emphasizes, poetry of the French baroque could not be less fluid. As well as noting the prevalent use of organized, almost geometric duplets of air and water, water and fire, hot and cold, he also notes the abundant use of lapidary emblems which push off against one another, like baroque architectural folds, without interpenetrating. Baroque nymphs stop adorning themselves with garlands of flowers, and take instead to wearing jewels. And the flowers they do wear bloom with a borrowed life, enduring unnaturally through every season. Stable substances are misposed upon liquid, so that water is variously described as gold, jasper, alabaster, and crystal, and the female body is described as ivory, marble, and silver…In this poetics of mineral and metal, words receive their value by virtue of their solid contrast, their folding against one another…”
“The 19th century novel and the photograph share the same struggle toward immediacy and facility guaranteed by an abundance of circumstantial detail…Which can be seen as part of a valorization of objects, via an apparent bypassing of the contaminating layers of subjectivity equated with death and obscurity according to an instantation of the maxim that the ‘this was so defeats it’s me.’”
“For our language ordains our relationship with reality as consisting in certain seminal ritual gestures: unlocking energy, ordering, measuring, storing, commanding. These ontological tasks are our own measure, and we perform them automatically, without genuine “activity,” alreaady claimed by a certain mode of apprehending our own role. Thus, in our seeking always to name, to concentrate in the name, to place and transfer through the name, we are ourselves included in that name, unwillingly ordering ourselves from within by that which we think we order from without. What is this nomination, but carnival naming?”
