you and i

looking you in the eye, i

say: you and i, here.

the miracle is

that i can sit here

and say your name.

 

pure language

tracing complimentation back

to the one pure language, the

tongue of the river mis

spelt, the loaf of the people

all peoples. we got distracted

at the turn before the pure way,

all were synthesized into a common thing

we held it in our hands like our still

born, still breathing, yet breathing?

sorry? what was that?

 

pain, brot.

i have become new aged.

the old age as outdated as the old adage

that those who see not what they seek

weigh not what they way. my

grains, whole, husqvarna, are

pre-seeded by visual aurals.

you cannot trust what you ear,

the date on the xray is ill-

edgeable. here, the new time

passes.

 

L=I=N=G=U=I=S=T POEM

[written months ago, after reading an essay by quine, and then one by jacobson.]

The rabbit rustles through the grass,

following previously known rabbit enterprises

in the area. Coming into rabbithood,  it

comes across a piece of cheese.

the cheese is not known to the rabbit,

not having eaten it, or spoken of it.

But neither is the rabbit known to itself

(the rabbit cannot know its self, nor its death)

nor, perhaps, to the native. nor is there

an idea of rabbithood, rabbit enterprises,

but pressed curds? The rabbit asks:

am i here? is this cheese before me?

if an idea of a rabbit did exist, and

an idea of cheese as well, would a

rabbit-idea do well to eat a cheese-idea?

a thing moves in the grass.

 

serious speech

Take this paper, this
paper. Take this paper now.
Well if not then, then
now. Take my art, mile
after her, which is so great.
For give them dearly,
fought they say not
what they know now.
They say only what they say.
Now, if not then, then
now.

 

willard van ormine quine

known by some merely as the man with the most awesome name in the world, by others as an eminent theorist of language, most people are unaware that he is also the most hilarious man in the world. consider these selections from the first chapter of word and object:

‘for the man who has learned his language lesson, some of the stimuli evocative of ‘Ouch’ may be publicly visible blows and slashes, while others are hidden from the public eye in the depths of his bowels.’ (p.5)

‘Ouch is not independent of social training. One has only to prick a foreigner to appreciate that it is an English word.’ (p.6)

‘different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike.’ (p.8)

‘by returning to the spot to the best of his judgment and so putting himself in the way of stimulations more firmly and directly associated with the attribution of stonehood or paperhood.’ (p.18)

 

language, relation, culmination

if it hurts you it hurts me (relation)

if it hurts me it hurts you (inversion, faith)

if it hits him it hits her (conflation, extrapolation)

she knows he knows (gramma subtraction, insertion)

it says they speak (potential passive, illustration, observation, sage, sprache)

it speaks! (culmination)

 

the use of a line

the collective history of humans is a difficult thing to put your finger on and say there, which is a way of gathering things together, bunching them to form a point at which something occurred.  this is partly because every thing stands in for some thing other, saying i am this thing when it is clear to every one that it is not that thing, but despite these problems it would appear that at some point, due to some forces (which are never measurable, less measurable than penises [who can say whose is bigger?], though forces are able to be felt, but the feeling will depend on the fullness of the bladder, what one has eaten in the morning, etc) families stopped including people, and people stopped becoming families. many people do still ‘have families’, but these are throwbacks to another era, and eventually they will fall into the slowness of past things, and they will be funny to us, like foreskins, or the absence thereof, they will sound immediately familiar and strange, as does the term water closet. the complete alienation of people and families can be seen in the way that a suburb that is a-good-place-to-raise-children, now never coincides with a-good-place-in-which-to-be-a-human-being. well may we look back on these days and say ah, back then we were workers. we may even form images of picking dried paint from our fingers with our dried-out nails. and it is good that we will say and do this. for a line is a completely slick thing. or a completely barbed thing. it can be slid in anywhere. it will take hold anyway. there is nothing unique about them. people say them all over the world, all the time. mothers say fucking hell, get off the bike. but equally, we might say fuck you you stupid yuppie bitch. and each line meets the other on its own terms. each one is a form. form being a deformation of from. so each is from something other. things begin to take on their own force. is this a logical progression? it is definitely a progression of words. maybe things have come too far now for us o follow the lines back, maybe we can never become families. it is us and them now. the continual question that never turns from me is: do you actually mean any of this? but all i can say is that i want to say it. which in some languages would be enough. the mothers don’t know that i would have said sorry.

 

abortive/aborted? post

this is a rerun of a lost post from last week. a second iteration where the first iteration was eaten by the internet. like when you handle the young of your pet mice (bad idea).

in my assignment for TM, i said it. the common thread between bachelard, de certeau and even the situationists, is a desire for the reinsertion of language into our understanding of and experience with space. our movements are dumb movements. even if we do read de certeau, how do we read those collective urban texts? our analphabetic understanding of space renders us completely dumb. that is, both stupid and without speech. i cited the example of two people repeatedly attempting to walk around each other on the same side. all that is needed is a simple left or right, i said. or not even something so literate. a gesture. a finger pointing to the side, a throwing of the head. but when  a stocky man ran toward me last week, and at the last second yelled LEFT! at me, my response, in place of moving, and engaging with language in space, was to yell GO FUCK YOURSELF! in this city, there is no originary way toward language for me. all experience of language comes filtered through bile. die stimme (voice) most definitely comes after die stimmung (mood). the mood being belligerence. i have become a belligerent person. this saying is the saying of my being. that is the form of things here. in sydney, i see no other way of coming to language.

 

talking footy

finally playing football is starting to feel like language again. for the first few weeks of the season, i was suffering from a completely debilitating cartesian duality. and we all know that the cartesian mind/body split is a hoax that never gets us anywhere. and football is no different. there was a bleak division between what i felt i should be able to do, and what seemed to happen when i told my body to move and do it. tonight though was becoming-football. feeling my body to be – as of course it is – completely tied in with the cerebral functions that presume to guide its movement. i felt myself to be in the field of play, and sensed things. i saw players look to where they were going to pass, and moved in advance to be there. prediction is easy if you understand the language. that’s what sports commentators mean when they talk about people ‘reading the game well’. you find yourself before a system, and you find a way through it. chaos is important. you can’t know that anything will lead to anything else. you can never really know what the best line out is, because you are relying on other consciousnesses, bad lighting, patchy grass. but you move within it. and when you start to feel yourself to be a part of that system, and not pushing up against it, you stop being frustrated, and you feel the way you do when you learn a language. or remember one. you stop translating from one language to another (mind to body) and start thinking as a spatially located body.  and of course everything does not happen perfectly, because of chaos, but lots of things do happen the way you want. and with each successful manouvre, you become more grounded in the space, and feel more confident. you become-more-football, i guess.

tonight was good also because we played against better players, which again is like language. no matter how competent you are in a language, it remains mere potential when you’re talking to a toddler. anything fantastic you say won’t be understood anyway. the more involved the register of the discourse, the more, obviously, you can say/play.