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you don’t have a place just because you barge in on it as a literal physical reality, or want it to prosper because you live there. Instead go see the Grand Canyon, that’s what it was made for. Place, you have to have a man bring it to you. You are casual. This is a really serious business, and not to be tampered with.
I am certain, without ever having been there, I would be bored to sickness walking through Gloucester. Buildings as such are not important. The wash of the sea is not interesting in itself, that is luxuria, a degrading thing, people as they stand, must be created, it doesn’t matter at all they have reflexes of their own, they are casual . . .
So to start, it’s one’s literal place – the ground – that we’re talking about, as Shakespeare wrote about his lover: “My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.” But that place can also be inhabited in other ways, and has been by Olson and other writers like Geoffrey Chaucer – a place without hierarchy that exists without “displacing” other places – possible with “the attention, and / the care,” even when “so few / have the polis / in their eye.” That’s the project.
Has not the velocity of change and consumption, through some law of diminishing returns linked to depletion of the planet’s life sustaining resources, overtaken our ability to stay in one place and allow ourselves the idleness local knowledge demands? (144-145)
One of the things that Olson is trying to say here is – if you’re going to have an independent society, which is this magazine – an independent community – then it has to be as good as any other endeavor. I think at some point he compares it to a fishing vessel where everybody on your crew would have to be tested, you wouldn’t want to have somebody on that boat, on your crew, just because you heard they were good. That could be very dangerous. So Olson engages Ferrini. (103-04)
He saw education as spiritual attack. On the first level we can take it as to attack a subject. There also was a kind of spiritual attack, it seems to me, on students frequently. He wanted things to happen in them. I don’t mean he wanted things to happen in his classes. He wanted things to happen in them spiritually. . . . Charles wanted to produce a new and redeemed man. This is actually Charles’ alchemy. (qtd. in Charters 11)
a place as term in the order of creation
& thus useful as a function of that equation
example, that the “Place Where the Horse-Sacrificers Go”
of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad is worth more than
a metropolis – or, for that matter, any moral
concept, even a metaphysical one (“Place; & Names”)
1. 1390-1399: Chaucer gives up his court duties and composes The Canterbury Tales
2. 1742: Henry Fielding publishes Joseph Andrews
3. 1847: Emily Dickinson writes a letter
“Now telleth ye, sire Monk, if that ye conne,
Somwhat to quite with the Knightes tale.”
The Millere, that for drunken was al pale,
So that unnethe upon his hors he sat,
He tolde avalen neither hood ne hat,
Ne abiden no man for his curteisye,
But in Pilates vois he gan to crye,
And swoor, “By armes and by blood and bones,
I can a noble tale for the nones,
With which I wol now quite the Knightes tale.”
Oure Hoste sawgh that he was dronke of ale,
And saide, “Abide, Robin, leve brother,
Som better man shal telle us first another.
Abide, and lat us werken thriftily.”
“By Goddes soule,” quod he, “that wol nat I,
For I wol speke or ells go my way.”
Oure Host answered, “Tel on, a devele way!
Thou art a fool; thy wit is overcome.” (10-27)
“Now herneth,” quod the Miller, “alle and some!
But first I make a protestacioun
That I am dronke, I knowe it by my soun.
And therefor, if that I misspoke or seye,
Wyte it to the ale of Southwerk, I you pray.” (28-32)
by beginning The Canterbury Tales with the Knight and Miller, Chaucer makes a clear statement that he is writing no longer from within the world in which he had for all his life served. On the contrary, he is now standing outside that world as an independent, and by no means uncritical, observer. He is not an untrustworthy servant – like the Miller, Reeve, Manciple, Summoner, and Pardoner. But his position is even more radical: he is a servant no more. (Patterson 14)
finds the physical world enough – its plenitude, its charm, its energy, its rules . . . an idea of order sufficient to man’s needs . . . a world temporarily – by an act of imaginative exclusion – unshadowed by Last Things (Kolve 92). . . . Characters in such stories live, for the most part, as though no moral imperatives existed beyond those intrinsic to the moment. They inhabit a world of cause and effect, pragmatic error and pragmatic punishment, that admits no goals beyond self-gratification, revenge or social laughter. (70)
by which courage is suddenly a new word in the dictionary, that we are surrounded by enemies and must stay fit. It sounds like athleticism to me, and when all that is is only demonstrated by self-consciousness of that it is, games are being played. I’d go straight from Nature to the World. If form ever did lie in tales and on short stretches of distance between personally known towns already the Collector of Port Duties on Wool in the city of London in 1390 had it.
She [Lady Booby] resolved to preserve all the Dignity of the Woman of Fashion to her Servant, and to indulge herself in her last View of Joseph (for that she was most certainly resolved it should be) at his own Expence, by first insulting, and then discarding him.
O Love, what monstrous Tricks does thou play with thy Votaries of both Sexes! How dost thou deceive them, and make them deceive themselves! Their Follies are thy Delight. Their Sighs make thee laugh, and their Pangs are thy Merriment! . . . Thou puttest our our Eyes, stoppest up our Ears, and takest away the power of our Nostrils; so that we can neither see the largest Object, hear the loudest Noise, nor smell the most poignant Perfume. . . . If there be any one who doubts all this, let him read the next Chapter. (41)
Traditionally, there is a tendency to see literature and the other arts as having a tenuous connection to politics at most. The aesthetic, the argument goes, is above the political, meaning not only “better than” but “beyond” and having little to do with the political. In this model, the critic tends to look at the organization and appeal of the formal attributes of the poem, often pointing to its representation of universal themes. (Lee Morrissey)
Today, literature has come to be associated generally with the “literary” or the aesthetic use of words, and it is often thought to be separate from many other fields. During the Restoration and the 18th century, however, literature was a very capacious field, and could include drama, history, natural philosophy (which we would today call “science”), political philosophy and poetry.
[T]he most famous 18th-century novels are populated by world explorers such as Robinson Crusoe and Lemuel Gulliver. . . . the landscape of the Restoration and 18th-century novel is the terra incognita of colonial locations, the New World that Britain was increasingly engaging. (255)
Art is most itself, is “true” art, when it makes itself not through the conventions of the universal . . . but, as Adorno thought, “by virtue of its own elaborations, through its own immanent process.” Lawrence Sterne understood this . . . as the only true law of the novel: the novel is “the art of digression.” This is why, ultimately, craft has little to do with whether or not a work is a successful piece of art. The most powerful and sinister gambit of what Adorno calls “administered society” is to promise the freedom of individuality while simultaneously prohibiting it. . . Art is a response to this repression. (52-53)
it’s almost unimaginable but extremely valuable for our understanding, to understand what dissent can mean and what assertiveness can mean and how it can be tied, how political thought, action, and what placing the body, literally, in line, can mean and how that can be tied to the imagination, to the imaginative faculties, to the creative possibilities and how constrained we are, how constrained things have become in so many ways.
I have been trying to find out ever since I came here & have not yet succeeded…. Has the Mexican war terminated yet & how? Are we beat? Do you know of any nation about to besiege South Hadley? If so, do inform me of it, for I would be glad of a chance to escape, if we are to be stormed. I suppose Miss Lyon would furnish us all with daggers & order us to fight for our lives, in case such perils should befall us.
Finding is the first Act
The second, loss,
Third, Expedition for the “Golden Fleece”
Fourth, no Discovery—
Fifth, no Crew—
Finally, no Golden Fleece—
Jason, sham, too—
I am a ward
And precinct
Man myself and hate
Universalization, believe
It only feeds into a class of deteriorated
Personal lives anyway, giving them
What they can buy, a cheap
Belief. The corner magazine store
(O’Connell’s, at Prospect and Washington)
has more essential room in it than
programs.
The tenses, in other words, of the mythological are never past but present and future, a thing I have elsewhere called attention to, about history as it has now re-presented itself. Anything done under strong emotional excitement (as Miss Harrison puts it) and done in front of and with another or other persons (which is all that collective need mean) is what is under discussion here (22)
Olson is a master in the normal sense, i.e., there is no trafficking possible with his means, so tied to the source is he with his art. Nor can we learn anything of use from him. . . . It isn’t that Olson doesn’t manifest the same recognizable properties that mark writing. It is that the terms are not extractable from the whole art: there are no terms, but there is the term of the form. It isn’t just a piece of logic to say that for the total art of Place to exist there has to be this coherent form, the range of implication isn’t even calculable. I know master is a largish word. I don’t mean my master. I mean Dostoevsky, Euripides. The power. It is a removal from the effete and at the same time the aesthetic.
But when the Place is brought forward fully in form conceived entirely by the activation of a man who is under its spell it is a resurrection for us and the investigation even is not extractable. And it is then the only real thing.
In contrast to centered (even polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of communication and pre-established paths, the rhizome is an a-centered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states. What is at question in the rhizome is a relation to sexuality – but also to the animal, the vegetal, the world, politics, the book, things natural and artificial – that is totally different from the arborescent relation: all manner of “becomings. . . . Some sort of continuing plateau of intensity is substituted for [sexual] climax, war, or a culmination point.” (Deleuze and Guattari)
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