Confusion Entanglement, philosophy, poetics
http://www.alansondheim.org/language.jpg "I'll throw this out there," Carlton said, "and see what, if anything, emerges." 1. Confusion entanglement: etymological impulse, poetics rooted in roots Why this return to (linguistic, word) roots by so many of us, myself included? What grounding does this give us, rooted as it is, in fairly recent history; no one returns to an originary language. Language splays, hourglass, for example Johnson's Dictionary at the waist. Looking for example at Assyrian cuneiform: so many languages constitute the writing, from Sumerian through Mitannian, Assyrian itself: polyglot. Even the Tanach has its polyglot moments. A poetics of metaphoricity is produced, rooted for the rootless. But the rootless wanders off, distanced from sound and the presumptive specificity of signs. Our psyche, if such, our minds wander here, among, as if length of time past results in a cultural depth that perhaps translates into broken philosophy? Think of Heidegger's roots reflected in the shattered mirrors of Torah coverings, mantles. Without language, no facticity; what's left is the muteness of the real. So then language. So then within language, truth and its problematic develops, almost as an illness. A plague of truth functions, debate in ancient India, logics, the 613 commandments of the Torah. Truths lay, lie, in the realm of language, always there. Mathematics, mathesis, something else again, and the same. Logic breaks loose, reflects a world of structures, not the chairs and tables of platonism. The hardness of structures that uncannily relates to what the visible world tells us through its signs reproduced and reduced to the bare minimum. The worlding of structures, categories, however called and culled. It's the culling that tends towards problems, politics, religions, as one climbs up Weisskopf's quantum scales. We're back in the world of roots, meristemation. The disconnection here is radical; mathematical structures reference abstractions rooted in abstractions, sets to categories, in the future somewhere along the line perhaps, the outliers of fundamental physics. This is far afield. Mathematical manifolds and physical realities, so there! The lifeworld is loosened, disconnected to the extent that logic becomes internalized, truth values are interwoven with linguistic categories, everyone knows that, but it's a mess in space and time and a mess on any other conceivable level. The etymological impulse is rooted in this, unraveling a mess that is fundamentally unravelable, that continues everywhere within the fractures of history, geography, what's left of consciousness. 2. hall of mirrors A hall of mirrors reflects nothing but itself; sooner or later, quantum effects dominates. Place an observer within, and everything collapses. Place a light source within, and everything collapses. The fault lies with us, not with the stars. The stars have no language. Are we sure of that? It's in these twists that philosophy lies, as in a bed, as in the impossibility to tell truths or untruths. Philosophy is always theology. I write myself into corners; I do not right myself out of them. In other words: a mess. Nonetheless there is something 'to be said' for the resonance of truth in sound. See for example, Guy Beck, Sonic Theology: Hinduism and Sacred Sound or Andre Padoux: Vac: The Concept of the Word in Selected Hindu Tantras. Resonant with Buddhism as well of course. But these are truths of the numinous; what does one do with facticity: smoke/fire or the jar on the hill? And in what language? For example, an etymological impulse that places a- as negative or negation in Sanskrit (already I get this false). And of course it's common place to say that negation exists only in language, that it's performative in this sense. Is this true? Somewhere von Foerster writes about learning and perhaps culture all the way down, amoeba learning to avoid, and passing this knowledge on. What is the language here? Is there any? I think through all of this as it seems that music as anything listened to from any sources mirrors the world in an uncanny way: how is this? For one thing, sound is always modified by the spaces it ...sounds... ; space resonates, the world is mirrored thus. And one may listen for repetition for example, for structure, for source, for the absence of source. The motley phenomenology of the world. And ... 3. confusion entanglement: etymological impulse, poetics rooted in roots Why this return to (linguistic, word of mouth) roots by so many of us, myself included? "The assertion of 'one language' appears to assuage the case of ambivalence for the Mimamsa school and brings us back to Ellul's general distinction between the realm of Reality which is visual and the realm of Truth which is nonvisual and only mediated by language or the Word: 'Anything concerned with the ultimate destination of a human being belongs to the domain of Truth.... The word must always remain a door opening to the Wholly Other [and] an indicator of ultimate answers.'" (Beck, p. 60.) Forgetting the theology of "ultimate," "Reality," "Truth,' what's striking is that truth is mediated, I would say _originated,_ in and by language. ("The sound resonated through the canyon, just as light itself, scintillated and reflected from a myriad of surfaces, rough and smooth, at all angles and colorations. Travis went deeper, into an inconceivable world of sound and light, the scutterings of creatures everywhere around him. Briefly disoriented, he continued on. Everyone experiences everything from different angles, he thought. There was no end to it, just as there was no end to his thinking.") Of course, thinking of language as a physical phenomenon, vibrations within or without a physical or space-time medium, then there's the question of reading. But I prefer to leave it at that, going back to the question of the etymological impulse in poetry and elsewhere today; I'll leave it at that as well. ... +++
_______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
