A poet in mind.

The other day preparing for a discussion on the translation of Derrida’s Mal d’Archive, I marked this passage from the Postscript. Marking passages in this book, which still seems to me like a fishing net with holes bigger than the fish, is the way to do it.

When he wants to explain the haunting of the archaeologists with a logic of repression, at the very moment in which he specifies that he wants to recognize in it a germ or a parcel of truth, Freud claims again to bring to light a more originary origin than that of the specter. In the outbidding, he wants to be an archivist who is more of an archaeologist than the archaeologist. And, of course, close to the ultimate cause, a better etiologist than his novelist. He wants to exhume a more archaic impression, he wants to exhibit a more archaic imprint that then other archaeologists of all kinds of science, an imprint that is singular each time, an impression that is almost no longer an archive but almost confuses itself with the pressure of the footstep that leaves its still-living mark on a substrate, a surface, a place of origin. When the step is still one with the subjectile. In the instant when the printed archive is yet to be detached from the primary impression in its singular, irreproducible, and archaic origin. In the instant when the imprint is yet to be left, abandoned by the pressure of the impression. In the instant of the pure auto-affection, in the indistinction of the action and the passive, of a touching and the touched...An archive without archive, where, suddenly indiscernible from the impression of its imprint, Gradiva’s footstep speaks by itself! Now this is exactly what Hanold dreamed of in his disenchanted archaeologist’s desire, in the moment when he awaited the coming of the “mid-day ghost” (97-98).
Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Eric Prenowitz trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Reading this, I came back to a very small part of Jean-Luc Nancy’s discussion of presence (Birth to Presence), specifically to one idea that presence, in its birth effaces the presence that representation would like to designate as its fundament, subject, or origin. When I myself am talking about presence, this effacement of “representation” of which Nancy speaks actually yields to a realization of all my excuses for reasons why I cannot allow the old books to do the talking.

It is a perverted search in every way, to look for an untouchable phenomenon that engines the soul, that is mourning or ecstasy, by way of competition, such as to be a better ________ or more________.

But the outbidding is the objects telling this, and coming to know that the competition is lost by going for it!. It turns out that my dissertation is even less scholarly and clever that I had previously thought (Thank God!?, Oh no?!). On Friday, I started a new text by citing nearly a page of Ramón Menéndez Pidal’s introduction to his Flor nueva de romances viejos. The mid-day ghost is nearly there doing something with a pile of gleaming jem stones that I imagine for positivist philology, appearing, all the while, and not at all in the background, an even stronger beyond spectre of don Ramón himself.

There is a line in a Julie Miller song that appears on the wonderful Cry, Cry, Cry album (1998) that goes well here. Lucy Kaplansky is the lead vocal and Dar Williams does some of the harmony. It sometimes brings me to Northampton, MA, to some of the Dar concerts we used to attend in the late nineties. We’d sing ourselves hoarse and think of kissing the chelloist, whose name I can’t remember. It goes:

Meant to find you all these years.

Two or three years ago, a poet I think I actually met in 12th century France, told me that it was futile to separate our desires for literature, to know, for sex, art, delicious food, and pleasant company. I would like to think I write only for that.

Monday Indulgence: Ode to cardboard boxes, but mostly to other stuff, unnamed.

There are probably people who still lead personal lives, who say, “We saw the So-and-sos yesterday” or “We’ll do this or that today” and enjoy it without its needing to have any content or significance. They like everything that comes in contact with their fingers, and are purely private persons insofar as this is at all possible. In contact with such people, the world becomes a private world and shines like a rainbow. They may be very happy, but this kind of people usually seems absurd to the others, although it is still not at all clear why (159).
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, vol. 1., Sophie Wilkins trans. Vintage, 1996.

The other day one of my teachers told me:

Look at that box. Look now, what do you see? Quick, now, before it acquires all of what it has come to mean, that I am packing and leaving here.

Look at this room we sit in. How do you describe this thing (pointing to the spaces between the ugly gray Berkeley bookshelves), or that, there (pointing to the spikes of the sprinkler)?

It is with a soft touch, the way of this book. There is not a single appointment in there, no fakery, no joke. Nobody’s planned a thing and everybody is wearing his or her house clothes. I think this book is the realist thing I have ever read. We say we are ugly and mean it. It’s a narration of the cardboard box and the unnamable things (and those before having come to signify) in filthy offices. The lone pink eraser I found one day out in the rain. The smells that bring me to things never stuck in cement, memories of turning on ceiling fans in central Oregon, of lifting the sweaty covers off a lover’s head when I didn't want to. Of veins and avoidance. Of thank God it is not, but oh! I wish it were, more often. And of all those unwritten moments I have had in this town that happened in a time suspended below the line. I love you!

After the box and the space between the shelves, in reading conversations this week between medievalists, bits of “trabajos científicos,” philosophy, and my own ugly notes, I have come to think about how things come alive in conversation. Why does conversation work? Why is there magic, the rainbow shine, the exquisite absurdity in oral exchange of ideas? Is it because in writing that much is hidden, couched in attempts at cleverness, or seated on safe concepts, that are actually impediments? Does the “idea” of literature lose force, or disappear, if only for a moment, such that the book can envelop, lick its reader in complicit handholding? Is it that this type of recall is another, irresistible sense that one casually finds and then consistently hopes to find again? I say, yes, yes, yes.