FragLit

an online magazine of fragmentary writing

::

Solitude

Spring 2010 :: Current Issue

II. (De)Compositions

A. Re-memberings
I have too
many mothers
to be
one
self. If I kissed
every mother
good night, I
would never
get to
bed.
There are so
many strangers
in me
whom I’ve
 
never even
met. Writing
is my way of
introducing
them to each
other.
You are what
you
remember;
in other words,
you
 
 
 
 
 
are
what
you forget.
I write to
 
misremember
myself.
Blow
 
 
 
winds blow—
shake the
leaves off
memory’s
trees.
(Mindblown
memories—
drifting clouds
crossing an un-
remembering
unforgetting
sky.)
Memory
 
 
 
 
both
the armor
and
the sword of
the self.
And
if I relax
 
 
my defenses?
Lay
my weapons
down?
Does
the self
feed on
memories or
memories
on
the self? Identity
as self-
cannibalism.
If
you seek
me in my
memories, you
will not find
me.
Nor
will you find
me in
my forgettings.
Since I am a
dis-
semination,
how can you
find me in
recollection?
Autobio
a contradiction
No
living
 
thing lives in
itself.
To remember
is
to change
what
one
remembers.
Far from
reconstructing
the self, the
memoir
constructs
selves that
 
have never
existed before.
  All
memory
an amalgam of
past and
future,
retrospection
and
prospection,
remembering
and imagining
 
 
 
and probably
 
more
imagining
than
remembering.
The memoir of
everything
I can’t
remember
The memoir of
everything
I don’t want to
remember
The memoir of
what only
others
remember
The memoir of
events that
have marked
my body,
escaped my
mind
The memoir of
events that
have been
marked by my
body
The memoir of
everything that
can’t be said
The memoir of
forgotten
avatars and
incarnations
The memoir of
lost time
The memoir of
lost places
The memoir of
sleep, of
dreams, of
dreamless
nights
The memoir of
stories I have
heard
The memoir of
the invisible
The memoir of
everything I do
not own
The memoir of
red
The memoir of
traveled
and untraveled
odysseys to
real
and imaginary
Ithacas
The memoir of
wounds
The memoir of
all
 
the others
The memoir of
true and false
 
 
unbeliefs
Bibliography
Anonymous.
 
The
Arabian
Nights.
Barry,
Lynda.
One
Hundred
Demons!
Beckett,
Samuel.
The
Unnamable.
 
Calvino,
Italo.
Invisible
Cities.
Carson,
Anne.
Autobiography
of
Red.
Deleuze,
Gilles.
 
 
Bergsonism.
Faulkner,
William.
As
 
I
Lay
Dying.
Freud,
Sigmund.
Repression.
 
Homer.
 
 
 
 
The Odyssey.
 
Joyce,
James.
 
Finnegans
Wake.
Loftus,
Elizabeth.
Eyewitness
Testimony.
Pema
Chödrön.
 
 
The Wisdom
of
No
Escape.
Pessoa,
Fernando.
Fernando
Pessoa
&
Co.
Proust,
Marcel.
In
Search
 
of
Lost
Time.
Russell,
Bertrand.
Why
I
Am
Not
a
Christian.
Shōnagon,
Sei.
The
 
 
 
Pillow
Book.
  Vālmiki.
Ramayana.
 
B. Sequences and Series (Series and Ensorcellments)

· The event ripens in the space between.

· Whereas the story seals and conceals the gaps, the series reveals and multiplies the openings between events. These gaps are the greatest gifts I have been given; now I pass them on to you.

· Between this thought and the next conception, between this feeling and the following quickening, between this act and the next contraction, between thinking and feeling, between feeling and acting—an opening always presents itself. The anxious mind is, however, always trying to close these gaps, lest they widen into solitude’s terrific unknowing.

·· After the ending, before the beginning, something else is possible.

·· Constrained by time and language to commence and to conclude, the series nonetheless gestures ceaselessly to the illimitable real, the actual series with its beginning and end being just the visible tip of reality’s endless beginningless virtuality.

··· Let us not confuse the one-after-the-other order of language with the all-at-once order of reality. (To the one-after-the-other mind, the order of the all-at-once world looks awfully like chaos.)

···· The world without sense is not a senseless world.

···· There is the active consciousness that busily makes sense, and the receptive consciousness that gracefully accepts the world’s unaccountable gifts. Of the two, it is the embracing consciousness that is both more sensitive and more sensible.

····· Sometimes the only reasonable thing to do is to let reason go.
····· Reason and rationality diverge more often than we think. In their divergence, the series unfolds.

······ While rationality insists on making sense, reason respects its limits, letting reality—intractably manifold—overflow it.

······ Whereas rationality drains the event of its very eventfulness, reason tries not to block any of the event’s exits.

······ Reason the pacific mind’s answer to disgruntled rationality’s aggression.

······ Only reason can protect us from rationality’s excesses.

···· The because of the mind rarely coincides with the because of reality.

···· Though the mind cannot think the immense sense beyond its sense, sometimes it can feel it. (Bliss.)

··· The paradoxical aim of the series—to present the impossible image of the event’s all-at-once in language’s one-after-the-other.

···· Poets have always known—the series is the form corresponding to the affect of surprise.

···· Only outside story can what comes next come truly as a surprise.

···· What is discontinuity but reality’s spontaneity?

·· Just as the finitude of the body gestures to the infinity of the cosmos, the finitude of the series evokes the vastness of consciousness—and of the infinite unconsciousness in which it turns.

Bibliography
Artaud, Antonin. The Umbilicus of Limbo.
The Bible.
Blake, William. Songs of Innocence and Experience.
Bök, Christian. Eunoia.
Calasso, Roberto. Ka.
Cantor, Georg. Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers.
Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things.
Lacan, Jacques. “Kant avec Sade.”
Lakoff and Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh.
Leary, Timothy. Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.
Mallarme, Stephane. Le Livre.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human.
O’Brien, Flann. The Third Policeman.
Pascal, Blaise. Pensées.
Perec, Georges. A Void.
Queneau, Raymond. Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes.
Riemann, Bernhard. "On the Hypotheses Underlying Geometry."
Sade, Marquis de. The 120 Days of Sodom.
Stein, Gertrude. “Composition as Explanation.”
Sterne, Laurence. Tristram Shandy.
Teresa of Avila. Autobiography.
Trungpa, Chögyam. The Myth of Freedom.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts.
C. Dialogues with the Dead

Just as some live more than others, some die more than others.
—Arthur Rimbaud

The dead leave many things. Every generation must decide—which remnants shall we pick up?
—Claude Lévi-Strauss

I love eavesdropping on the conversations of the dead.
—William Butler Yeats

The hemlock didn’t stop Socrates from galliyapping on.
—Diogenes

The dead too have their odysseys.
—Padmasambhava

Some only find their voices after death.
—Kathleen Ferrier

Repetition never dies. (The dead repeat themselves in us.)
—Pythagoras

Some prefer to speak with the dead, others with the unborn.
—Marcel Proust

The dead decide many things for the living, just as the living decide many things for the dead.
—Eric Hobsbawm

In the dead’s great clamor, sometimes a voice rises above the rest.
—Arvo Pärt

Of what the dead keep silent I am most induced to speak. (It is the silences I hear loudest.)
—Paul Celan

I only write unfinished sentences. (What excites me most are the poems I never begin.)
—Friedrich Hölderlin

Like intimate lovers, the living and the dead finish each other’s sentences.
—Anne Carson

Those who speak for no one speak to me most. Perhaps this is why I am entranced by the discourses of the dead.
—W. G. Sebald

In death, as in life, some voices travel farther than others.
—Thomas Browne

The dead do not choose what they say, any more than the living do.
—Baruch Spinoza

The karma of language.
—James Joyce

The living and the dead are constantly crossing the boundary between them. (Like most boundaries, this one is imaginary.)
—Jacques Derrida

The dead never mean what they say. But neither do the living.
—Lewis Carroll

Whatever you say may be your last words. (Everything you say is your last words.)
—David Hume

What the dead say depend on who’s listening.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

How many tongueless dead riding on my voice?
—Helen Keller

Again and again I die to language, finding myself with nothing left to say.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein

Why do the living always force the dead to speak? Perhaps they’d prefer to rest in silence.
—Sigmund Freud

The living have always needed the dead more than the dead need the living.
—Novalis

No awkward silences in conversations with the dead.
—Heinrich Schliemann

Death turns all answers into questions.
—William James

Death is the mother of writing.
—Jean-François Champollion

I do not care to finish the dead’s unfinished business.
—Marquis de Sade

We are the dead’s unfinished business.
—William Faulkner

The dead don’t speak, unless they’re spoken to.
—Gilles Deleuze

Some conversations only become possible after all the interlocutors are dead.
—Tom Stoppard

The living own their discourse even less than the dead.
—Roland Barthes

Bibliography

Anonymous and Anonymous. Gilgamesh.
Anonymous and Polyonymous. The Gospel of Judas.
Anonymous and Heteronymous. Voynich Manuscript.
Barthes, Roland and Mrs. Barthes. Camera Lucida.
Beckett, Samuel and Charlie Kaufman. Krapp’s Last Tape.
Browne, Thomas and W.G. Sebald. Hydriotaphia or Urne-Buriall.
Celan, Paul and Theodor Adorno. Poems.
Chomsky, Noam and L.L. Zamenhof. Reflections on Language.
Deleuze and Guattari and Alfred Kinsey. A Thousand Plateaus.
Dickinson, Emily and Edward FitzGerald. Poems.
Geisel, Theodor and Jonathan Swift. Horton Hears a Who!
Kafka, Franz and Ovid. The Metamorphosis.
Lem, Stanislaw and Italo Calvino. Imaginary Magnitude.
McWhorter, John and Raymond Roussel. The Power of Babel.
Melville, Herman and Walt Whitman. Bartleby the Scrivener.
Padmasambhava and Friedrich Nietzsche. The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Pinker, Steven and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Language Instinct.
Rhys, Jean and Charlotte Brönte. The Wide Sargasso Sea.
Rice, Anne and Vlad the Impaler. Interview with the Vampire.
Rilke, Rainer Maria and Lou Andreas-Salomé. Sonnets to Orpheus.
Sappho and Gertrude Stein. If Not Winter. Trans. Anne Carson.
Sebald, W.G and Roberto Calasso. The Rings of Saturn.
Shakespeare, William and Christopher Columbus. Hamlet.
Stevens, Wallace and Charles Ives. Harmonium.
Stoppard, Tom and Euripides. Travesties.
Whitehead, Alfred North and John Cage. Process and Reality.
Yeats, William Butler and Timothy Leary. A Vision.
Zinn, Howard and Malcolm X. A People’s History of the United States.



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