from Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart

by Mark Epstein

Most of us exist in a state similar to that of Freud's friends. Our minds are running on without us, keeping us at a distance from that which we love, or from love itself. We justifiably complain of feeling unreal because we are busy keeping ourselves at arm's length from the biggest reality of all--the transience of which we are a part. Rather than permitting a flow, we impose an interruption that interferes with satisfaction or fulfillment. As my rabbi discovered, successfully permitting an intimate connection requires the ability to embrace impermanence. The flower that blooms for only a single night is indeed a sight to behold. (72)

from Retallack's Experimental Feminine

Which is to say, experiment and tradition should, in an ideal world, form the dialogic energy that creates vital cultures. In fact nothing of interest happens without this synergy which is not to say that it’s business as usual. Our Western cultural image resembles a brain with a severed corpus callosum—each side functionally innocent of the other. Did an evil surgery occur while we were all asleep in one fairy tale or another? One side happily thinks everything is simple; the other side unhappily thinks everything is complex. In this chronic bifurcation, a potentially collaborative “we” is missing the fact that complex dynamics aren’t monsters lurking in forests, threatening the simple pleasures of blue skies. They are the forest. They are the blue skies. They are our entire natural-cultural environment. They may indeed consume us, but this is only a grim certainty if we don’t embrace them with respect and understanding. Since Mandelbrot presented us with computer models of the fractal geometry of nature, we have recognized the beauty in forms of chaos, which is inherently fractal. It was apparent before in turbulent romantic landscapes, but not yet identified as global dynamic principle. Perhaps our dysfunction, at this point has less to do with a paucity of intellectual and aesthetic evidence than the lingering wound of Occam's razor regularly sharpened by market logics. Chaos theorists may tell us that things are not as simple as we’d like them to be, but can we afford to believe that?

The Clem in Winter

Berlinale to screen restored 'Metropolis' at Brandenburg Gate

released or in process can you put the pieces or maintain a puzzle assortment of wandering each color like Picasso in shapes across the image reflected against my memory having heard you sleep like red or orange in displaced lines curving and undecided can you reflect this intended or forgotten sometimes there are dots or stripes a geometry of body breast simultaneous association can you place or replace with each new thought (specifically) (constructed) for this or every purpose rearrange the letters the lines with a color one color for each notion though sometimes notions are confused having listened to misplaced memories ((re)constructed) a process of coping antipathy surviving a modern visual aesthetic with too many possible immediate layered inflection or innuendo how many ways can you see this me the clarification of disorder explosion of detail communication of the impossibly simple.

yellow wall swirl the bird she says listen to nothing no song no idea in order to in the face of without regard a constant effort. a constant turning fear that most desired fragmented whole of sounding cacophonous as if without sound. silver shards remind me to sit alone against the wall, yellow, burning winter shimmer quick turns fear into grey, along the edges, a refrain. moving parts slow quell repeat a soft hum replaces chatter endless reason, the edge of nothing. the blind can only hear everything. close your eyes, listen every silence.

from Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart

by Mark Epstein


As a student of human neurosis, Freud was familiar with the mind's tendency to interfere with its own satisfaction. In his own way he understood something of what the Buddha explained to Angulimala. In his descriptions of the obsessional character, for example, he gave great credence to the power of the mind to interrupt the flow of gratifying experience. He called this a psychological defense and gave it the name isolating. Speaking primarily in sexual terms, Freud described how the thinking mind interferes with experience and removes the possibility of successful contact. Erotic experience depends on the ego's striving to become one with that which it desires, Freud recognized, but this is also a potent source of anxiety. We fear that which we most desire, the falling away of self that accompanies a powerful connection. In a moment of successful contact...there is a brief but exuberant unity, a touching or a connection in which we forget ourselves and are enriched. Our selves are reconfigured in this process. But Freud was witness to how people restrict this capacity by holding themselves back. It is as if we have a "taboo on touching," he said. (57-58)


Once Freud figured out that the purpose of so much of our thinking is to isolate us from the flow of gratifying experience, he began to see this dynamic in many of his friends and patients. Much of the liberating promise of early psychoanalysis stemmed from its attempts to cure this isolating tendency of the human mind. But scattered within Freud's writings we find references to his frustrations in actually effecting the kinds of changes he was reaching for. He thought deeply about the reasons for the self-imposed isolation of the thinking mind but had difficulty translating his insights into a method of change. While his insights were revelatory, he did not have the method of the Buddha within his grasp. (61)

from Butler's Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

Perhaps, then, it should come as no surprise that I propose to start, and to end, with the question of the human (as if there were any other way for us to start or end!). We start here not because there is a human condition that is universally shared--this is surely not yet the case. The question that preoccupies me in the light of recent global violence is, Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, What makes for a grievable life? Despite our differences in location and history, my guess is that it is possible to appeal to a "we," for all of us have some notion of what it is to have lost somebody. Loss has made a tenuous "we" of us all. And if we have lost, then it follows that we have had, that we have desired and loved, that we have struggled to find the conditions for our desire. We have all lost in recent decades from AIDS, but there are other losses that afflict us, from illness and from global conflict; and there is the fact as well that women and minorities, including sexual minorities, are, as a community, subjected to violence, exposed to its possibility, if not its realization. This means that each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies--as a site of desire and physical vulnerability, as a site of a publicity at once assertive and exposed. Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure. (20)

on process

copied from Kristine's Flickerfit post: New

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, on process philosophy page:

The philosophy of mind is another strongpoint of process philosophizing. It feels distinctly uncomfortable to conceptualize people (persons) as things (substances) -- oneself above all -- because we resist flat-out identification with our bodies. However, there is no problem with experiential access to the processes and patterns of process that characterize us personally -- our doings and undergoings, either individually or patterned into talents, skills, capabilities, traits, dispositions, habits, inclinations, and tendencies to action and inaction are, after all, what characteristically define a person as the individual he or she is. Once we conceptualize the core "self" of a person as a unified manifold of actual and potential process -- of action and capacities, tendencies, and dispositions to action (both physical and psychical) -- then we thereby secure a concept of personhood that renders the self or ego experientially accessible, seeing that experiencing itself simply consists of such processes. What makes my experience mine is not some peculiar qualitative character that it exhibits but simply its forming part of the overall ongoing process that defines and constitutes my life. The unity of person is a unity of experience -- the coalescence of all of one's diverse micro-experience as part of one unified macro-process. (It is the same sort of unity of process that links each minute's level into a single overall journey.) On this basis, the Humean complaint -- "One experiences feeling this and doing that, but one never experiences oneself" -- is much like the complaint of the person who says "I see him picking up that brick, and mixing that batch of mortar, and troweling that brick into place, but I never see him building a wall." Even as "building the wall" just exactly is the complex process that is composed of those various activities, so -- from the process point of view -- one's self just is the complex process composed of those various physical and psychic experiences and actions in their systemic interrelationship.

in a moment of aimless falling powder burns
cold the insufferable closed system undoing
undying where do you think it is possible
that he has gone, an ounce measured once
ink splayed played, notes left on a grave
it is not in the timing everything in space
simultaneous suffering an explosion unexpected
funeral of detail and control, he will have been always
as winter, my ear to concrete opens quiet into detour
into grace, chatter clatter stilled breathing empty
tones of earth of hum, his voice an atmosphere attitude
having lived, having loved


--in memory of mike grzymkowski

what can be safely carried
like crows cooked with oatmeal
or left alone
toss advice, crack it like an ax
breathe fire and marginalia

what can be wrong
washed, tolerated unfamiliar
under a leaf realize
little green bullets
or blackberries

drive a truck through each false
allusion
and recede

water, like small silver bells
waits, distant
moving through molecules of desert air
eating every saturday, teach it
to answer

Lyn Hejinian from A Border Comedy

Just as you’ll note that breathlessly though wordily I’ve been making micro-
scopically libidinous movements
Toward your nebulous rosy and always retreating body
Which feathers a mention
And needles in question
And is ever in flight between
But I will have it
The daring statement unites us
Going by the longest way—the roundness (211)

Lyn Hejinian from "The Rejection of Closure"

In the gap between what one wants to say (or what one perceives there is to say) and what one can say (what is sayable), words provide for a collaboration and a desertion. We delight in our sensuous involvement with the materials of language, we long to join words to the world--to close the gap between ourselves and things--and we suffer from doubt and anxiety because of our inability to do so.

Yet the incapacity of language to match the world permits us to distinguish our ideas and ourselves from the world and things in it from each other. The undifferentiated is one mass, the differentiated is multiple. The (unimaginable) complete text, the text that contains everything, would in fact be a closed text. It would be insufferable.

Daily Tao

Sunday, 17 January, 2010 :: 29


Do you want to improve the world?
I don't think it can be done.

The world is sacred.
It can't be improved.
If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you'll lose it.

There is a time for being ahead,
a time for being behind;
a time for being in motion,
a time for being at rest;
a time for being vigorous,
a time for being exhausted;
a time for being safe,
a time for being in danger.

The Master sees things as they are,
without trying to control them.
She lets them go their own way,
and resides at the center of the circle.

sonnet

"Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom."
--Shakespeare Sonnet 116


That breaking lesson purchased and forgotten
creeps between time's appetite, keen
like maladies eager, appealing every sense
shaken, unknown, fair past reason
music, without name, disgrace, full of blame.
Bliss, once proved straight
Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame
breathless living lips blush, a gentle gait.
False, or foul sweet fingers sound
doubting impediments prove, urge, accuse.
Accidents dream in red, delight cruel
raven eyes surmise, wandering slander.
What with bold reason hated
Ever perfumed, only pleasing, faded.

each crystal turning
toward a hint
knowing passersby shed
caffeine while i no longer
faces in a crowd
detail relation between
unnoticed and meaning
carried shining like
nickels
held firm
while every minute
sheds
a rock displaced
changing
the landscape

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Fugue of Death
by Paul Celan Translated by Christopher Middleton
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at nightfall we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night we drink it and drink it we are digging a grave in the sky it is ample to lie there A man in the house he plays with the serpents he writes he writes when the night falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete he writes it and walks from the house the stars glitter he whistles his dogs up he whistles his Jews out and orders a grave to be dug in the earth he commands us strike up for the dance Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night we drink you in the morning at noon we drink you at nightfall drink you and drink you A man in the house he plays with the serpents he writes he writes when the night falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete Your ashen hair Shulamith we are digging a grave in the sky it is ample to lie there He shouts stab deeper in earth you there and you others you sing and you play he grabs at the iron in his belt and swings it and blue are his eyes stab deeper your spades you there and you others play on for the dancing Black milk of daybreak we drink you at nightfall we drink you at noon in the mornings we drink you at nightfall drink you and drink you a man in the house your golden hair Margarete your ashen hair Shulamith he plays with the serpents He shouts play sweeter death's music death comes as a master from Germany he shouts stroke darker the strings and as smoke you shall climb to the sky then you'll have a grave in the clouds it is ample to lie there Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night we drink you at noon death comes as a master from Germany we drink you at nightfall and morning we drink you and drink you a master from Germany death comes with eyes that are blue with a bullet of lead he will hit in the mark he will hit you a man in the house your golden hair Margarete he hunts us down with his dogs in the sky he gives us a grave he plays with the serpents and dreams death comes as a master from Germany your golden hair Margarete your ashen hair Shulamith.
By Paul Celan, translated by Christopher Middleton, and published by HarperCollins in The Poetry of Our Own World, edited by Jeffrey Pain. © 2000 by Christopher Middleton. Used with permission. All rights reserved.