Re: <documenta X><blast>Hair-Splitters
cwduff@alcor.concordia.ca
Sun, 27 Jul 1997 14:38:45 -0400 (EDT)
Morgan....
Words (and word absences, in the
> sense of taboo words which are transgressive. .... Snip and cut and snip
and cut and now you say....
> categories, ways of perception, implicit definitions, distinctions both
> subtle and coarse And
( for hair-splitters, take the distinction between
> "celerity" and "alacrity" )... the word as invocation, well, invokes a way
> of seeing things, but word as audience responds to things, a yin and a yang
> function.
> *************Are you denying there is a difference between
celerity and alaracrity. Calling this hair-splitting seesm to imply there
is no difference. There are worlds of difference. Celerity is the state of
lightness and levity attendant upon understanding, and it transcends
velleity. It has nothing as such to do with the affect, it is one might
say a state of ecletic gladness and heightened intellectual clarity,
seeing through the end of the thing one has examined. It is the quickest
status of the mind before it flames off into the lambent particles of the
night.
Alacrity is the gladness and cheerfulness one finds after
recovering from a shock, a depression, a sickness and it is also the
"natural" state of energia that allows a person to recuperate everyday
and begin again. Alacrity and the affect, the heart are close friends and
intimately linked.
Celerity is the friend of the intellect where angelic doctors and
mystical chieftans, rabbinic scholars, have pulled the threads of
a complex argument together, and the lucidity of all arguments yields
before
the moment of its temporary completion.
There are no synonyms. There are only words beside each other,
like bodies on the bus, planets in space. Lovers in bed only multiply the
differences between their space, and the similarities which are evoked by
resemblance. Evoked only to vanish in the smoke of desire and its
difference from sameness. Allow me to quote.
"Celerity was the name she wore when I spoke,
Later there were songs named beauty.
She called out her name, and there was
the diabolus of the mind, hinted at other things.
Alacrity she said to me, when she walked naked across the room.
I smelled a body in the furniture, and the heart grew thicker
each second.
I had never seen her before. "
What speaks in language that allows to recover our name? Nothing
but different validities of the language. She speaks to her lover on two
niveaus, one the intellectual glory of an enlightened name, a name filled
intellectual apprehension and satisfaction. In the other, she is a body
happy with gratification, and the roudness of sensual repletness.
"All summers, seek their winters."
CD.
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