Status Updates From Something Speaks to Me: Whe...

Celan renders the thought in the pithiest form I know: “Art makes for distance from the I.” In German, you can say that in three words: “Kunst schafft Ich-Ferne.” “Art creates I-distance”

Deleuze: “Literature begins only when a third person is born in us that strips us of the power to say ‘I’”; if a writer is to write in a new language, Deleuze says, “the self must be destroyed.”

I can be flabbergasted by what I encounter only when I hold at bay my everyday self, that fellow whose habits and moods I know far too well. “Revolutionary joy is what comes out of great books,” Gilles Deleuze has written, “not the anguishes of our petty narcissism or the terrors of our guilt.”

The blinding of Gloucester or the shriek of the man with the washerwoman (Kafka) can lead me to think that this is more than I can take, that “this should not be.” But then there are incomprehensibilities that puncture me in a different way: I fall in love, or learn that a friend’s son has taken his life ..and in my joy or rage or grief I think: this thing, wholly incomprehensible, should not be; and yet it is.

Emerson: “One must be an inventor to read well,”Walter Benjamin (whose true critic “forgets to pass judgment”), or on Stanley Cavell, who has written: “Describing one’s experience of art is itself a form of art; the burden of describing it is like the burden of producing it.”

On occasion, I can definitely testify to this Cavell’s “burden of describing” when writing on this site.

When the thing Ive made looks back @me, I see neither an expression of the feelings&thoughts w/which I maintain a daily closeness (my “inner life”)nor a testament 2my social embeddedness (identity) but thing strangely familiar brought in2 being by a familiar stranger. It can be a thrill 2 come face2face w/something made by someone who coincides w/me while differing from me: shrewder,more honest, less weak—wiser

poetic work is lumpy: in no place its parts gather into a final form, not because as the product of human beings perfection remains out of reach, but because the work invites participation&continuation-it is essentially incomplete or,as Schlegel says: it is fragmentary. It doesnt settle but keeps working, this makes it a work: a work is a work as long as it works. at diff times or contexts, it does take a diff shape.

We read to be inspired. If that is too mawkish, then say: we hear so that we may speak. And if that sounds too oracular, then: we read—we look, we listen, we feel—to do things we did not know we could or would or should do. Or just: to make freedom.

There are bodies of knowledge I can acquire and techniques I can learn. Often, they aid me, though sometimes they get in my way (and I never know which of these will occur). But they can never prepare me for the moment a poetic work addresses me in a way that surpasses my capacities, the ways it touches a wound I did not know I carried.

You realize that poetry(&any art) is a form of witchcraft, requiring another kind of criticism, one that seeks the truth that poetic making reveals, rather than some knowledge it might glean by asking questions&taking down answers. For “there is no other solution but 2practise it oneself, 2become one’s own informant, 2penetrate one’s own amnesia, &2 try & make explicit what one finds unstatable in oneself.”

Charles Baudelaire, in an essay called “What Good Is Criticism?,” ..declares that “the best criticism is the kind that is amusing and poetic” and that “the best review of a painting could be a sonnet or an elegy.”

When Friedrich Schlegel coins the term “poetic criticism” (actually, poetische Kritik), he has in mind a form of making that will—I quoted it a few pages ago—“replenish the work, rejuvenate it, shape it afresh.”

I understand so that I can make, and through making my understanding changes. The two participate in one another. Indeed, participation is the way poetic criticism manifests itself: as I speak about The Trial, as I stutter my way into it, I take part in The Trial. I make sense of it and, making sense, make it part of my life.

The point—one point—is that, because sense is not a durable good you can keep in storage, gathering old sense always involves making new sense. There is no primary literature that does not come after—in response to, provoked by—some yet more primary thing. There is no interpretation that is not also creation, and no hermeneutics wholly bereft of erotics.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, an advocate of philosophical hermeneutics, has written: “History is always written anew because the present determines us.”24 History determines us. The present determines us. We pronounce these words easily, blithely, as though we had pulled them from a fortune cookie, forgetting how heady they are and how frightening.

2/2The world I encounter (in the book)is so full—mostly of images of myself..I empathize with the fate of those I encounter in a story; I identify with a point of view that I discover in a philosophical reflection; I project my worries and wants; &soon the work is peopled with imaginary versions of myself..Intimacy is not extinguished entirely, but it is overwhelmed by the weight of moral and intellectual vanity.

In naïve reading I develop closeness, not intimacy,&while it is the object that feels close, the closeness is mainly with myself—actually, with an image of myself. Everything mirrors my world&speaks my tongue, prodding me to find myself in what I see&hear. When I succeed, I am pleased, &when I come up empty, I declare the work incomprehensible (or “unrelatable”)..That way, I mostly find what I possess already.

Every teacher knows that unpracticed students, like prophets and child prodigies, can suddenly speak the truth, seizing on something essential in a work, something that may elude expert readers even after years of study. But as a rule, such insights are just as suddenly washed away by waves of earnestly felt solidarity or indignation or nostalgia linked to some character or theme.

The Proustian … “I” is not the one who remembers, confides, confesses, he is the one who discourses; the person this “I” brings on stage is a writing self whose links with the self of civil life are uncertain, displaced. . . . It is vain to wonder if the book’s Narrator is Proust (in the civil meaning of the patronymic): it is simply another Proust, often unknown to himself. (R. Barthes).

When I feel stuck lining up words on a page, I open a volume by Nietzsche or Baldwin, more or less at random, and wait for some of the electricity coursing through their words to leap over to mine. How crude, you might say, how instrumental. In fact, I know of no greater compliment one can pay a work: crediting it with the power of arousing the urge of making.