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In a short string of words, in an aphorism, a fragment, even—despite
the possible turn to didacticism—in a proverb, there’s a great deal
resting on the few words standing out like signs in space: small
figures on large ground.
Soon enough these few words will move out of the way or turn transparent, and vaster things can come to presence . . .
Perhaps common, intact mysteries will surface, delivering into the long gaze of an "inner eye" that moment when grammar morphs over into glamour—sounding
the etymology and cultural history in the distant corruption of the
word we use to describe the groundwork for organizing and standardizing
the language (grammar), to reveal the roots of the word for a spell or
enchantment delivered through "magic" sequences of words (glamour).
These couplets and louche proverbs first emerged in the aftermath (after-path?) of reading Barrett Watten's Complete Thought and, more or less at the same time, interleaved in those readings, the Reverend George Herbert's Outlandish Proverbs.
Something in the words of these two—one who lived only 40 years in the
age of Donne and Bunyan and Shakespeare and Izaak Walton (author of The Compleat Angler,
who also wrote a biography of Herbert), and the other who is still
writing in the 21st Century and the age of deconstruction, nuclear
weapons and the Internet (and has his own web site)—intersected and germinated.
Somewhere early on in Closing Time, Norman O. Brown
says about reading Joyce and Vico, "two books get on top of one another
and spawn." What's posted on this site, at the start anyway, is
something spawned like that.
Other immediate precursors in the formative constellation: fragments (especially from Sappho and Heraclitus), Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, Burma Shave signs, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, Barnett Newman and Jenny Holzer. And plenty of forgotten things. |
