belgium

It was sunny and warm every day. We drove to Ypres (Ieper) and walked as far as we could on the ramparts of the city. At the Menin Gate I looked for the regiments from Nottinghamshire and read their names. The light came through the arches and lit the wreaths of paper poppies. We ate bread and cheese sitting by the city moat.

My favorite thing in Bruges (Brugge) was the Begijnhof, now a Benedictine cloister. It is a square full of tall trees, whose shade falls across whitewashed buildings. Some have green glass windows, like the one above the door here. The house numbers were painted on by hand. Bruges was full of little loops of painted metal reading AVE MARIA, tourists riding bicycles, waffle-sellers. I bought poppy candies in a little jar.

Later we drove to the seaside, to Oostende, where I found candy shaped and flavored like violets and sticks of rock caramel, and my first pier, and an arcade to make Mr. Benjamin proud. And the sea, of course, which was cold and full of big waves, and me. Later we went home, rode our bicycles, made a cake.

Now I am back in England, with many sweet things and many sweet things to recall.

bees, return, deconstruction

Lots of photos to come (we did go to the seaside and I saw my first pier, and we bicycled through the Belgian countryside, and I picked poppies in Ypres and ate a waffle in Bruges), lots of work to do--I start teaching a two-week workshop today for this. I'm reading a lot about deconstruction and music. Looking to prove the positivity, insofar as proof is ever possible. And thinking about bees, honey, hive, and comb, which I find everywhere (this is at St Pancras Station in London).

le train numéro ---, en provenence de Paris Gare du Nord...

...rentre en gare, quai numéro --, à 15h24. Bienvenue à Lille-Europe!

I'm in Belgium for the next few days (via Eurostar to Lille) visiting a friend...Ghent, Brugge, Ypres, maybe the seaside. I did a lot of work yesterday and feel better generally about the PhD, which is the way of it. And now I'm going to read articles on the train, write some ideas, and listen to new music. And write postcards, as always. And come home ready to do more work. As always.

reiteration

"When I say 'yes' to the other, in the form of a promise or an agreement or an oath, the 'yes' must be absolutely inaugural.... Inauguration is a 'yes'. I say 'yes' as a starting point. Nothing precedes the 'yes'. The 'yes' is the moment of institution, of the origin; it is absolutely originary. But when you say 'yes', you imply that in the next moment you will have to confirm the 'yes' by a second 'yes'. When I say 'yes' I immediately say 'yes, yes'. I commit myself to confirm my commitment in the next second, and then tomorrow, and then the day after tomorrow. That means that a 'yes' immediately duplicates itself, doubles itself. You cannot say 'yes' without saying 'yes, yes'. That implies memory in that promise. I promise to keep the memory of the first 'yes'. In a wedding, for instance, or in a promise, when you say, 'yes, I agree', 'I will', you imply 'I will say "I will" tomorrow'...otherwise there is no promise. That means the 'yes' keeps in advance the memory of its own beginning.... So 'yes' has to be repeated and repeated immediately. That is what I call iterability....The second 'yes' will have to reinaugurate, to reinvent, the first one. If tomorrow you do not reinvent today's inauguration, you will be dead. So the inauguration has to be reinvented every day" (Caputo, John D. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: Conversations with Jacques Derrida. pp27-28).

after-midsummer

Today it's grey in the bright-but-still-oppressive way that seems to be a speciality here, and I'm tired of working--the condition of the PhD seems to be that there is always more to do, and today I just don't feel smart enough, or hard-working enough, to do that 'more'.

Listening to some Grizzly Bear and plonking myself in front of my work (well, right after this) should help. I'm going to Belgium on Wednesday for a couple of days. That should help, too. I hope.

Back to it seems to be the answer--

collection

Magpie-like, picking up what glitters. (In the glare of your mind, be modest./ And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.)

Surprised over and over by the beauty of the world, I want to show everything to everyone.

I hope I can bring my family here.

Money seems to be at the root of so many of my worries (where will I live, how will I afford it, what am I going to do for a job, I wish I could just buy pretty things when I wanted them).

--

Leonardo Boff:

It is not a "one" that is primary but the "three". The three comes first. Then, because of the intimate relationship between the "three" comes the "one" as expressing the unity of the three. Believing in the Trinity means that at the root of everything that exists and subsists there is movement; there is an eternal process of life, of outward movement, of love....that truth is on the side of communion rather than exclusion; consensus translates truth better than imposition; the participation of many is better than the dictate of a single one.

Believing in the Trinity means accepting that everything is related to everything and so makes up one great whole, and that unity comes from a thousand convergences rather than from one factor alone. We never simply live, we always live together. Whatever favors shared life is good and worthwhile.

--

Andrew Bird playing 'Souverian' live at the Orpheum Theater in LA:

The song 'K' by the Clientele (most of their music, actually). This is 'Saturday', another favorite:

--

Norman Ackroyd's etchings. I would like to own something by Fiona Watson, someday. At the Royal Academy show I was too poor to buy a book with the titles and names, but I'm sure one of the paintings was hers. I made a sketch.

--

I'm reading This Nest, Swift Passerine, by Dan Beachy-Quick, and it's alchemizing me. Along with the Juliana Spahr and Corrina A-Maying the Apocalypse. Trying harder, failing better.

yes.

which is the trumpet flower blooming over a wall

which is tinged by lack, but rejects that lack:

instead, going everywhere, bright red, insistent

Some days I am so tired of how hard things are. I want enough money so I don't have to scrape all the time and worry about things. I want a house that isn't rented. I am sick of working on my dissertation, that apparently endless project, but anxious about getting a job when I'm done (which leads right into the funding-running-out worry). I miss my family and best friends in the U.S.

It's not all skipping down dappled lanes, reciting poetry and going for picnics dressed in Edwardian costume here.

But I read Juliana Spahr's stunning, amazing, absolutely beautiful This Connection of Everyone with Lungs twice in the last week. It reminded me that the project of saying yes is not only about a kind of immediate beauty. It's about being able to let things be--to know that what you can't control will be all right, and to go on, even when you're tired, loving the people around you (those you know and those you don't know) as hard as you can.

small travel

Spent the weekend in London, walking everywhere. Cherry tree on Judd Street was fruiting, mostly eaten by blackbirds (and people who could reach the lower branches). I went to the Royal Academy Summer Show and made many small drawings. My boots and I were tired out by Sunday afternoon.

These mews appeared unexpectedly. Mews--what used to be stables (mews were where hawks and falcons were kept) behind great houses. I think they are my favorite kinds of houses here.

Everyone was in the park (this is Green Park) to enjoy the sun. Behind us there were boys playing a miniature game of cricket, badly. But the arc of the bowler's body is graceful and a joy to watch [ed.: see comment; here's evidence of my Americanness contaminating my perspective! In baseball, a pitcher; in cricket a bowler].

A reminder, found on Picadilly.

Cy Twombly lithographs in TATE Modern.

repetition

Poems in the morning: I'm making false translations of a book of Dutch poetry by young people from the 1960s. Leicester on Wednesdays or Thursdays (Wednesdays I can stay til 8 p.m., which means I get a 9-hour day in the studio and still don't have to pay the peak travel prices). I'm making more etchings (a new series); that's another kind of multiple. Thesis in the afternoons, I'm working on my new chapter now and it's refreshing (though I really need the screenplay to arrive in order to do more work). Job applications, which are now a matter of refining the letter and CV that are already 'good enough'. A certain rhythm to cooking--and company. Repetition makes a human-scale (me-scale) calendar out of time which is otherwise endless to this small being stranded in its midst.

anon.

Certain kinds of anonymity I like, like masks. And I've always kept the comments open to anonymous commenters because I liked the idea that one didn't have to register to comment. But that relies on everyone playing by the unspoken rules of sharing space, and I've had some just plain weird comments lately--all anonymous. It makes it uncomfortable, because I'm pretty open, to feel as though there's someone sinisterly withholding their own name--especially after I had a few directly aggressive comments last summer. So all comments are moderated and require a name, now. Sorry indeed to those of you who play fair but don't prefer to register (and I'll miss hearing from you if you now don't leave your thoughts).

and now for something completely different

What else makes me happy right now, besides my work? Well--Saturdays spent wandering around the little town where I live, buying flowers for a friend, happening upon jumble sales (whence the little bee jar, which was promptly named "more clutter?!" by my companion and "oh, perfect!" by yours truly), having lunch in the garden, lazy afternoons with the windows open and the sun coming in.

And when the sun moves away for a bit, the clouds, the sound of rain on the skylight, and then a double rainbow just above the roofs outside! (Could I really avoid exclamation marks when talking about things like this? They were made to show wonder and excitement.)

And once the rain has passed, I like to go into the garden again. My friends drew the plant labels with me and helped me cut the grass (with shears) and turn the soil (with small garden forks) and pull the weeds and remove the stones, so being there at all--the garden being there at all--is just a reminder of how lucky and how beloved I am.

methodology 5

But--to return to my own arrival at the place where a methodology that crosses disciplines as well as the boundaries of feeling versus thinking-- for me, the question is also one of topic. If philosophy, speaking about love, "mistreats it or betrays it" (The Erotic Phenomenon, 1), and has forgotten its own roots in love and wisdom such that it is only "of use in populating universities and in having discussions among the initiated but without the impact on our lives that a wisdom presupposes" (Irigaray, The Way of Love, 3) and allows the philosopher to "remain among those like himself without confronting the delicate...relational problems" (5) that a discipline based in love would require, then how to write a philosophy, a theory, or a poetics of love without purposely going outside the main system of knowledge? Using texts from across the disciplines makes the constellation bigger, shows the way relation puts things into play that philosophy (or even the idea of disciplinarity) sometimes won't accept, like the body--like, for Irigaray, "a language that creates...a language that lives" (12). The scholar I am learning to be would not read as well, would not think as well, without the contributions that poetry, art history, everyday life, and even things like walking around, watching people, working in the garden make. Not closing myself off to ‘non-academic’ or non-scholarly, or even extra-disciplinary methods allows me to learn about making theory in ways that I might not if I felt more wed to one way of doing things. The work of the body is good for the mind, and all that.

Of course, there are objections to be raised to this methodology--not least of all that it might be appropriate for some book or other, especially if one is a well-known theorist already, but that in terms of the requirements for a PhD dissertation it might be on shakier ground. It is presumptuous and not a little arrogant, isn’t it, to say to what is essentially a canon of scholarly and critical literature, I know better than you how to treat these texts. But that is what any dissertation asserts, in the end; that is, to some extent, what it means to make a contribution to the literature. And, in my case, there seems to be precedent not only in the theoretical works I'm using to frame the thesis but within the case studies themselves. For example, at one point, Toni Morrison suggests that her readers, scholarly or otherwise, be receivers for “resonances” ("Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature." Within the Circle : An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. Ed. Angelyn Mitchell; 377). Her language creates “spaces, which [she is] filling in” but which “can conceivably be filled with other significances” (393). She goes on to write that the “point is that into these spaces should fall the ruminations of the reader and his or her invented or recollected or misunderstood knowingness” (393). And when, in an interview, Morrison says that she “would just like to feel less isolated” (Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, and Kwame Anthony Appiah. Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present; 128) by critical attention paid to her work, I think it is not far off to say what she is asking for, as her work's proxy, is for a listening, living attention to be paid. So there is, then, a natural place for the reader to sit within Morrison’s language and listen.

But perhaps the best defense this kind of methodology has--if it needs one--is inherent: it is flexible, adaptive; it is responsive to the needs of the text, the time, the writer, and her context. It is not prescriptive. It can say yes--in a very Derridian way, maybe--to many different, even contradictory things, and "make a promise...to take into account the singularity of the Other" even if it is used "to criticize, to ask questions, to challenge" that is also "an irreducible affirmation" (Jacques Derrida, Interview) of that otherness. The position of saying yes in this way is an obviously affirmative one, an open one--one that allows the texts to want and the writer to listen. Despite its weaknesses, a ragpicking methodology fits my project and my texts--and my writerly self.

--

“Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them” (Rilke, Letter 3)

“Although Coleridge may have been referring specifically to poetry when he devised the phrase, might ‘a more continuous and equal attention’ offer not just a way of reading but of living as well?” (Donaghue, Denis. "Congenial Disorder: Why should we look for comfort in poetry?" Harper's. Sept. 2008; 98)

methodology 4

So, I suppose what I'm talking about is actually what is meant by methodology, which has to do with the philosophy behind a choice of methods--the unifying concept that makes them right for the project. It's like what Matthew Crawford (the motorcycle mechanic) said about working on older bikes, where the manual of standard procedures sometimes has to take a back seat, so to speak, to a more lively, imaginative engagement with the machine: "Good diagnosis requires attentiveness to the machine, almost a conversation with it, rather than assertiveness" ("The Case for Working With Your Hands", pg. 4). My methodology is interested in finding out what the constellation of objects that make up my argument want, rather than being a set of rules I can apply. Teresa Brennan, in her book The Transmission of Affect, writes about something she calls "living attention" (23, 25, 37, 41, 130, etc.). It appears as "its other variants...: love, optimism, logic" (130) and requires--precipitates--attachment to those around oneself. To Brennan, being "coldly detached is being much to preoccupied with one's own position, and it narrows one's focus. It forecloses the feeling intelligence...in which one is open to new ideas about the other" (131). I would like to think that a methodology which borrows what it needs as the need arises--which is responsive and responsible--is one that examines with a living attention the texts that it finds.

A living attention requires more than a scholarly attention that is somehow still detached--Brennan writing on affect, Jean-Luc Nancy writing on listening both talk about the way that affect or sound reconnect the subject with itself. When you feel you are reminded of your bodily self and you are re-entered into a position of subjectivity; for Nancy, the subject is "that part, in the body, that is listening or vibrates with listening to--or with the echo of--the beyond-meaning" (Listening, 31). And Jean-Luc Marion writes that "one must speak of love as one must love--in the first person....I will not be able to hide myself behind the I of philosophers, that I who is supposed to be universal, a disengaged spectator or a transcendental subject" (The Erotic Phenomenon, 9). Writing from the position of a feeling subject, a subject who is, whether we'd like to admit it or not, marginalised by the academy, the writer has to acknowledge the limits of her own knowledge. It's a fundamentally respectful way of approaching a text.

And, since the writer who writes from feeling (if feeling is first)--from affect, from the position of an affective subject--will find herself on the outside of certain kinds of discourse, what recourse does she in fact have but to go about picking here and there? It's liberating to feel a little bit 'outside', because it gives one the freedom to take what is useful and leave the rest--although it does come with the burden of proving that this is indeed useful after all, and the danger that then it will become a static or unquestioning way of seeing, in a methodological spiral that does no one any good!

(More tomorrow. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.)

methodology 3

As I was working on my chapter, I came across the book Pictures and Tears by James Elkins, an art historian who teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Cork. As the title implies, the book is a study of "the ways pictures can move us--strongly, unexpectedly, and even to tears" (ix). What appealed to me about this initially was, I have to admit, a certain satisfaction at finding someone who would assert that tears were as legitimate a reaction to a piece of art (or music, or literature) as any critical gesture, and that those reactions we term 'irrational' might actually help us widen our understanding of what art is (and even what beauty is) and how it works--not to mention widen our understanding of what a critical response is and where it might find its genesis. Elkins compares philosophy to a "levee, keeping back the flood of disorderly thoughts" (22), but finds that sometimes philosophy is no match for the primacy of feeling--for instance, in the encounter many people have with the Rothko Chapel in Texas.

(As an aside, e.e. cummings may have said this better when he asserted that "since feeling is first/ who pays any attentionto the syntax of things/ will never wholly kiss you;/ wholly to be a fool/ while Spring is in the world// my blood approves,/ and kisses are a better fate/ than wisdom" ["since feeling is first"]. He at least said it more poetically, but then again, that wouldn't be appropriate here!)

Elkins sets out to find out about crying and pictures, but he says that he does not "want to understand these wonderful phenomena, or press them into the box of some...theory" (28). He has a liberty there that I do not--and one that I'm not sure I want, either--which is to stop where tears meet the image, to wonder about academics who are "content with their 'stony, unfeeling natures'" and who live without crying in front of paintings, who "don't feel much and [are]...suspicious of people who do" (103), but not to continue, in this book, deeply into the question of what happens when an academic relearns "how to initiate intimacy with objects" (121). This isn't a shortcoming of the text--it's simply the limit that it doesn't cross.

And in the end that's neither here nor there for me--what was useful was the idea here that on the range of responses to a text, tears might be as useful, and as thoughtful, a reaction as any other. I had also been reading W.J.T. Mitchell's book What Do Pictures Want? around this time, and it seemed to me that the question he applies to art history might be just as usefully applied to literary theory, and I wondered whether, in a dissertation about love that somehow also places love in opposition to other narratives, like history and philosophy, a consideration of feeling--of affect--as an indication of what the text needs (or, in Mitchell's term, lacks) might be appropriate.

(More tomorrow, Part 1 here, part 2 here.)

methodology 2

I began thinking more about my methodology while writing a chapter on Toni Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved, with which I'd guess many of you are familiar. If you're not, it's about a family of slaves who have escaped slavery; when the overseer from the farm where they had been kept arrives to 'reclaim' them, Sethe, the mother, kills one child (and, it's intimated, would kill all four) in order to keep them from being taken into slavery. The book deals with ideas of love--how it is enacted, what it can be, what it means to be beloved and to love--but it also questions the transmission of knowledge, how the means of transmission are normalised, and the kinds of violence that knowledge and 'truth' can do. I felt even more strongly that while looking at a work like this I didn't want to rely exclusively on a tradition that had been used oppressively toward the people in the text, and to which reference is made. (The overseer in Beloved is called Schoolteacher, and the indoctrination he gives to his nephews is referred to pretty much exclusively as 'education'.)

The system of classification, taxonomy, and valuation that arose from and alongside our tradition of philosophy can be violent; it does not, in Derrida's words, assure "an affirmative desire towards the Other--to respect the Other, to pay attention to the Other" (interview). I wanted to find a middle way, one that would engage with the tradition of critique while respectfully interjecting that it was not, perhaps, quite as complete as it might be thought. I found support for this idea everywhere from Derrida himself (in the idea of the supplement) to an article in the New York Times by Matthew Crawford, a political-philosopher-cum-motorcycle-mechanic, who wrote that when it comes to actually putting theory into practise, "you put the manual away and consider the facts before you. You do this because ultimately you are responsible to the motorcycle and its owner, not to some procedure" ("The Case for Working With Your Hands", pg. 3). That was it exactly; I felt responsible to the text, but not to a particular way of looking at it or working with it.

(More tomorrow. First part here.)

methodology 1

A while ago I presented my research to a group of people from different disciplines, and the first question I was asked after I had finished speaking was to describe my methodology. I have to admit that at that point I wasn't even sure what a methodology was, especially in theh umanities; I was familiar with methodology in science and social science research, but I wasn't sure exactly what that could mean in terms of what was essentially a literary project like mine.

In that case, the question was primarily to do with my justification for including works across a range of genres--a film, a novel, a short story, a book of theory, and a book of poems--in my dissertation as my case studies. I wanted to show that the phenomenon I'm looking at--the representation of the space between people who love one another as a charged and generative space--was a general enough occurence to merit (or require) expression across genres.

But as I've continued thinking and reading, the question of methodology has surfaced over and over. My research has led me to texts like What Do Pictures Want? by W.J.T. Mitchell and Pictures and Tears by James Elkins, as well as like The Transmission of Affect by Teresa Brennan, and more traditional texts of the critical theory canon, like Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and Baudrillard's The System of Objects. And then, reading The Way of Love by Luce Irigaray and The Erotic Phenomenon by Jean-Luc Marion, I noticed an interesting parallel: both theorists identify a lack in Western philosophy--and not only that, they identify it as philosophy's reluctance, or even unwillingness, to deal with love. And to me, what that meant was that I could not approach my own thesis from a viewpoint that came exclusively from a tradition of critique that did not acknowledge my subject.

(part two tomorrow)