In Faulkner's Mosquitoes. Sound and motion and time and being and art.

[Faulkner's omniscient narrator in Mosquitoes:] (pp7-8)

As you entered the room the thing drew your eyes: you turned sharply as to a sound, expecting movement. But it was marble, it could not move. And when you tore your eyes away and turned your back on it at last, you got again untarnished and high and clean that sense of swiftness, of space encompassed; but on looking again it was as before: motionless and passionately eternal--the virginal breastless torso of a girl, headless, armless, legless, in marble temporarily caught and hushed yet passionate still for escape, passionate and simple and eternal in the equivocal derisive darkness of the world. Nothing to trouble your youth or lack of it: rather something to trouble the very fibrous integrity of your being.


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sound. movement/action. the living. (not always but very often) existence/being/intent.
In Sanctuary, there's the sound men make, in lightless rooms. Popeye's lack of sound; he walks like a cat, and even strikes matches like a cat, although cats don't smoke. What can't be seen is always felt, often heard.

soundless. motionless. eternal. eternal is also dead. it doesn't move, and it doesn't make any sound.
Art pieces as things of timelessness, or rather un-time-less, lack of time, devoid of time. Thus, motionless and passionate, eternal and dead. Like people turned into stone, in fairy tales. Sculptors can capture so much motion and vigor--motionless and passionate. Without time, without the seconds before and after, there's no movement. Movements need time. The difference between motion pictures and photographs. It has to be made clear that there is a fundamental difference between the two. A photograph is a still. as soon as it is caught in the still, the mute--yes, photographs are devoid of sound--what is pictured in the picture is dead. captured. dead. Soundless. Motionless. It is thus a vestige. like the fossilized footprints of dinosaurs. That which once existed and once moved. Moved. but it can't move anymore. It is quiet.

Of course it's nothing to do with youth. Even youth is temporal. One needs to be in time to be old, as well. Youth cannot be captured in a picture. We imagine youth, looking into the picture. We reconstruct the time, at the center of whose flow the picture cut across without any volume. it's flat. timeless. A torso, a head, an arm, a leg, or their lack. It is a body, a body part, that is represented in the picture. It is not present, because it lacks spatial volume, and because it lacks temporal volume. A sphere differentiated into a circle, that is what a photo is. or a sculpture. "in marble temporarily caught and hushed." Yes. caught and hushed. caught and hushed. in marble.

Language, too, is caught and hushed. no matter how good the writer is. no matter how hard the writing-being tries. Life is immediately disassembled and pressed into a two-dimensional world. The reading-being reconstructs the life. Ever seen sci-fi movies where they disintegrate organisms into the molecular or atomic level, send the tiny pieces of the once-living to some other place, and then reconstruct the whole thing? That's it. that's the writing and reading process. caught and hushed yet passionate. That's it. A narrative is in fact a trick. deception. Time comes into existence--a rather weird expression, it seems--when pieces are given their relative locations in a narrative, and then the narrative extends along every possible axis, creating a space, a voluminous space, voluptuous motions. take a picture, write a novel, and the whole process starts to run in reverse again.

Think of it this way, The Sound and the Fury as a title really makes sense, doesn't it?

Why don't we just read a whole book for the whole semester.

Every great text is great because of *how* it discusses what it discusses, rather than just what it has to say. That is why I'm getting more and more worried about formal education that consists mostly in training students to memorize 'summarized' versions of texts (of sociologists, philosophers, novelists, etc). I'm not against memorization per se. One needs to have a certain amount of knowledge in a given field before she can build her own, personalized and critical knowledge on top of it.

What I'm concerned with is that almost everything taught in school is based on one and the same foundation, when it comes to what people often call the "philosophy" of education. More precisely, the epistemological and ontological foundation of what is taught in school. Or even more precisely, the fact that THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ONE AND THE SAME EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND ONTOLOGICAL GROUND for everything taught in school, or various texts and discourses in general.

A great text builds its own ground. It deliberately defies the given, the conceptional and linguistic convention that implicitly encourages certain ways of linking ideas and words. It is a vigorous and often painstaking movement that tries to furrow its own channel (or canal, if you prefer to think the flow as that of fluids) through which the old language flows and is defined anew. Great texts contest over the rules of language themselves, rather than produce another combination of the given materials.

So, basically, I would like to see teachers teaching ONE book for the whole semester. Well, that might be too extreme. Okay. Maybe a couple of books. Or even some short passages. Quantity itself doesn't matter. Let them struggle with them. Let them read one damn passage over and over again, until they finally *kind of feel* that something is being written, being produced, from the level they usually just take for granted. Why should we even care if our children all go through the same textbooks (not literally the same books, but assortments of similar pieces of knowledge)? We all know that they won't even remember most of them.

(And same goes to undergraduate and graduate curricula. I really think we are told to read too much, and not to really immerse ourselves in the text. One.good.text.)

that self-confidence is expensive, you know.

That's confidence, he said.
This guy I know, every time there's
an Olympic Game, a World Cup,
A GLOBAL FESTIVAL, WE'RE NOW ALL GLOBAL,
he just quits his job and goes there and enjoys his life
and then comes back and gets another job,
That's confidence, he said.

Millions of books talking about Confidence,
Self-Confidence, Believing-In-Myself,
LIVING YOUR LIFE TO THE FULLEST.
Well, let me tell you, my friend,
that's class. that's money.
Does bourgeois sound some archaic, dead 'Marxist Thing' to you?
That confidence you're proclaiming,
that's called bourgeois.

(global fucking bohemian gypsy.)

the irreligious strikers

(From "War in Paterson," by John Reed. He, an activist-journalist, records his experience of imprisonment during the 1913 silk workers' strike in Paterson, and the words of his 'cellmates', i.e., immigrant strikers.)


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... One thing I noticed was the utter and reasonable irreligion of the strikers--the Italians, the Frenchman--the strong Catholic races, in short--and the Jews, too.
     "Priests, it is a profesh'. De priest, he gotta work same as any workin' man. If we ain't gotta no damn Church we been strikin' t'ree hund'd years ago. Priest, he iss all a time keeping working-man down!"
     And then, with laughter, they told me how the combined clergy of the city of Paterson had attempted from their pulpits to persuade them back to work--back to wage-slavery and the tender mercies of the mill-owners on grounds of religion! They told me of that disgraceful and ridiculous conference between the Clergy and the Strike Committee, with the Clergy in the part of Judas. It was hard to believe that until I saw in the paper the sermon delivered the previous day at the Presbyterian Church by the Reverend William A. Littell. He had the impudence to flay the strike leaders and advise workmen to be respectful and obedient to their employers...

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"If we ain't gotta no damn Church we been strikin' t'ree hund'd years ago." T'ree Hund'd Years! That really made my day, I'm telling you.

the precarious business of culturing words

Poetry is dishonesty
                        but i had to be half asleep
i am a voice
a trembling
         words are dropped
        laid on the surface
        of endless water
      so shallow, but the water is
           never still

a trembling, cut
    pieced   hastily weaved
                                        desperately (is it really all we have?)
    laid out on, i dropped it
                on
          the unwritten body, and i
wait, looking
                        away, for
the foreign signs to grow
     on to strangers

          how dare i desire honesty
                 when i had to be half asleep
                         but my trembling was

                                    alone.