Re: <documenta X><blast>Words Wearing Us

cwduff@alcor.concordia.ca
Sun, 27 Jul 1997 13:52:30 -0400 (EDT)

How strange and delightful. I read this book 20 years ago. I
remember it quite well. It was amazing. I have quite a good volitional
memory, meaning I can call quite a lot of things up at will. But nothing
like Shereshevsky. Harold Bloom, the american critic, is known for
his perfect recall. I think all these matters are quite interesting and
linked
to the memory techniques of the early human race. Once a memory created a
street, which led to a type of visioning even. It is again Vico one thinks
of and his speculations that the first human beings were poets - because
they were all creators. Memory worked with vision (thus the Muses are the
daughters of memory) to enable us to work and see. Words were things (as
with children to some degree), and for the poet they are also things.
Sartre, in What is Literature, describes poetic language as the place
where Words are what they signify. For a prose writer they always point to
a thing. Sign and referent, I suppose is another way of saying it, or of
course the famous signifier and signified. In any event, for poets words
are magic things which speak themselves through him/herself- there is
Joyce in Finnegans Wake who treats each letter and
syllable as sacred. For Tristan Tzara words are living creatures
of rebellion.
For Helene Cixous they are something else yet again. For Cixous, French
wors need to be de-gendered, thus each poet works the language against and
for
their own memory, vision, and experience. Words are spaces (with times of
register and duration) where cities appear and peoples emerge.
So I differ with you on this point, it has been preserved in the
case of poets, and for Russian poets I imagine this to be even more the
case. Russian Poets still have tremendous Memory by heart.
I dont say to memorize by heart makes one automatically a person who sees
words as things, but for poets who do have that facility intact (Brodsky
did I understand), it will be perhaps be easier. Perhaps (no, not perhaps)
Memory works by love, and words are also Lovers easier to remember when
the Beloved is near by.

1997, Viktor A.Mazin wrote:

> Clifford Duffy wrote at 27.07.97:
> >Words are also
> > bodies with sexes and places, names and colours.
>
> Yes, but the archaic ability to
> apprehend words as 'bodies' has
> been saved only in certain cases. ** yes, the poetic mind.
>
> Russian psychiatrist A.R.Luria described
> 'absolut' memory (The mind of a mnemonist.
> Cambridge, Massachusets and London, 1987) of
> his patient, mnemonist Sh. (Shereshevsky) who,
> like Funes in Borges story, can remember
> everything. Sh. had eidetic memory. When
> Sh. had to recall something (words, numbers,
> formulas) he reconstructed 'syllabic' route by
> replacement words, syllables for the
> images which he arranged along streets.
> The road of mnemonist always took him to the
> house of his childhood. **** The trip down memory lane....
>
> >To speak the space of words in their
> > interior movement, to shudder at their inner desire, to let the space
> > between them filter through to us in their inter-subjectivity and
> tension.
> > Then their auras, their halos will join us, and be one more piece
> > carrying us on our adventure to a new world.
> > "All words are restless grains and gods waiting to be opened."
************************************
> Yes, but the mechanism of substitution,
> in a case of mnemonist Sh., for example,
> in a case of eidetic memory, based on
> random correspondence between words *****
If I recall righly Sh. suffered over his powers of memory? What I speak of
does not cause suffering, but creates a route, a place, a road to
creation. Words are not simply things, rather they are physical, and they
are the enchanted stone which marks the pace of invention. The never seen,
never heard before. And that links them to all words which have been
uttered before. *****
> and things.
The coomon is a notion of > space (or a metaphor of space), articulated
> as a differnce and similarity between
> readable and visible world. **** Would you elaborate more on this ??
>
> Olesya Turkina
> C.Duffy "WHere words are magic texts which fibrillate."
>
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