Re: <documenta X><blast>Hair-Splitters
Morgan Garwood (mgarwood@inch.com)
Sun, 27 Jul 1997 15:10:40 -0400
At 02:38 PM 7/27/97 -0400, you wrote:
> 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.
no, there's world of difference between the two, but to comprehend that
world of difference, one has to be psychologically situated just so. I came
to understand the difference as one of will or volition, you might say the
spirit of the way something was done. To act with celerity implies a high
degree of volitional freedom, celerity is the way one does things out of
inner pleasure or satisfaction, where alacrity is what a smart corporal
shows when the sergeant is looking. I believe that is is indicative of the
culture's nature when we see much service labor (that kind that is now
being described as "emotional labor" to distinguish it from intellectal
labor) that it tries to recast alacrity (when I say jump, you hop, little
frog!) as celerity (so nice to be of service to your sublime platinum card
self, sir!)... it is the narrowing of the distance between the two into a
hairsbreadth of difference that is the difference...