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{ Wednesday, June 11, 2003 }

Two more passages from my notebooks

More Jabèsian circumlocution to drive Prentiss nuts. "In order to make sense" indeed.

...as if all the truth carried in the book -- this portion of dark where the light wears thin--were but an approach to death, for which writing is both chance and misfortune; a death becomes ours through every word, every letter, through sounds and silence, where sense is only what makes sense of the adventure. As if, moreover, in order to make sense, this adventure needed the deep sense of words, their multiple meanings, which are but focal points of their radiance.

Thus the book, carried by its words, lives through their intimate life and dies sharing their death.

Thus we are first led on and then abandoned by every fraction of a second of our life. So that we can finally bear witness only to this abandonment.

And I found this copied in my notebooks, and thought it to be related to the comments on the Jabès quote below. It is from the writings of Alphonse Daudet collected in In the Land of Pain, about his struggle with syphilis, of which he eventually died:

Are words actually any use to describe what pain (or passion for that matter) really feels like? Words only come when everything is over, when things have calmed down. They refer only to memory and are either powerless or untruthful.

LINK | 1:46 PM | TB

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  { COMMENTS }

Yes! Right on, Alphone Daudet!

A friend recently loaned me a copy of the New American Encyclopedia of Social and Commercial Information (1908), 908 pages of dense text and a few illustrations which purport to teach bookkeeping, animal husbandry (horses, cattle, poultry), German, French, Spanish, violin, piano, cornet, gymnastics, parlor magic, swimming, boxing, wrestling and dancing, among other arts and sciences. The reason this is funny is that language can't adequately encapsulate much of this knowledge. If it could, we'd never need to study these subjects in meatspace.

As for the Jabès quote about the approach of death, I am reminded of the latest They Might Be Giants tune to sweep our household, popular among all market segments from 4.3 to 43. It's called "Older" and the lyric goes:

You're older than you ever were
And now you're even older
And now you're even older
And now you're even older
You're older than you ever were
And now you're older still

Time
Goes marching on
And time
Is still marching on

Etc. Repeat until dead.

Prentiss Riddle | June 11, 2003 3:24 PM

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is jabes the inspiration for 'the prayer of jabez---chicken soup for the soul of the pseudo-intellectual'?

'there is no use trying,' said alice; 'one can't believe impossible things.'

'i dare say you haven't had much practice,' said the queen. 'when i was your age, i always did it for half an hour a day. why, sometimes i've believed as many as six impossible thing before breakfast'.

i was so much older then, i'm younger than that now.

f.o.p. | June 11, 2003 4:56 PM

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http://samvak.tripod.com/artist.html

---
How can one even half accurately communicate one's anguish, love, fear, or desire? We are prisoners in the universe of our emotions, never to emerge and the weapons of language are useless. Each one of us develops his or her own, idiosyncratic, unique emotional language. It is not a jargon, or a dialect because it cannot be translated or communicated. No dictionary can ever be constructed to bridge this lingual gap. In principle, experience is incommunicable. People - in the very far future - may be able to harbour the same emotions, chemically or otherwise induced in them. One brain could directly take over another and make it feel the same. Yet, even then these experiences will not be communicable and we will have no way available to us to compare and decide whether there was an identity of sensations or of emotions.

Still, when we say "sadness", we all seem to understand what we are talking about. In the remotest and furthest reaches of the earth people share this feeling of being sad. The feeling might be evoked by disparate circumstances - yet, we all seem to share some basic element of "being sad". So, what is this element?

We have already said that we are confined to using idiosyncratic emotional languages and that no dictionary is possible between them.

Now we will postulate the existence of a meta language...

http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem86.html

---
Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet,
Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!
I feel a nameless sadness o'er me roll.
Yes, yes, we know that we can jest,
We know, we know that we can smile!
But there's a something in this breast,
To which thy light words bring no rest,
And thy gay smiles no anodyne.
Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,
And turn those limpid eyes on mine,
And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.

Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
Are even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel?
I knew the mass of men conceal'd
Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd
They would by other men be met
With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;
I knew they lived and moved
Trick'd in disguises, alien to the rest
Of men, and alien to themselves--and yet
The same heart beats in every human breast!

But we, my love!--doth a like spell benumb
Our hearts, our voices?--must we too be dumb?

[...]

| June 12, 2003 7:19 AM

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