writing about co's work tony said yesterday something about composition what is expected of a robust work, is structure. In a large sense, I really am meditating here. It's not as if I've had theses thoughts already. I will focus on what enables that movie we saw last time to 'give me voice' but not speak for me I will discuss the challenges of this, the inevitable pull toward the exotic, for example Finally, I will think about my own work. I will consider these challenges as I confront my project to make music in (for, by) the suburbs So first, this film & how does it play for me? What is it that lets me say, "it gives me voice"? Can it be a way it listens ahead of me? that there is a listener anticipating my hearing, taking care. The attention to listening let me become a listener, it allowed me to listen as myself. In that a discovery of "myself" a necessary uncovering or becoming. In that moment of listening I am allowed to come into being. Necessarily, I must feel as if I am centered. For it to be mine I must feel, not necessarily that I was the imagined center of the work, but that I may be myself-as-center. It is important that I do not feel that I must transform, shift into the shape of some other viewer. If I were not able to take the film as myself, then It could not be matter for becoming. So to the next point in keeping with my structure. My being-through-the-film is only made possible by a series of subversions, decenterings, questionings of the center. Primarily I can focus on the multiplicity of languages that denies a single all-knowing viewer position. I am not forced to be jealous of one viewer who knows it all. That those who can understand the Vietnamese, distinguish the different dialects, they lack that element of not-knowing. I feel as if my not-knowing as diaspora is not imagined, anticipated in the films production, as a place of decay (of knowledge, of centering) but is seen as another valid position (not center, not off center) When co in her interviews talks about hearing as the Vietnamese in exile as part of making the film, I am allowed to trust in my experience. I can read the specificities of myself in the process of understanding, coming to understand. I make the claim, then, that all of the politics of interviews, they come to this. They come to this point in which I am let in. I am let in wholly, or what feels more complete than ever before. Consequently, the archetypal interview is one of closing, bounding, of keeping out. It imagines a world of only two speakers and two listeners. I am made a voyeur as I read, or rather, I am an incomplete, disempowered version of the authors who read first. The text is dead when I come to it. So lastly, as for my own work. I will soon make the album in the suburbs. I will join with my increasingly talented fellows. They've had nothing to do but make this music, pump the iron. In a way, I am nervous, to meet them, to take them on, to do them justice. My question: how can I leave room for them? How can I make this work open to their experience? even further, how can I open this work up to more experiences? Co's work tells me: decenter, question the center even in its absence. So I must imagine the center, and I cannot merely kill it, It will remain as its corpse. To move it, or to dance with it, play, move it around. Yes, to open it up to many. Manifold Manifest Manufacture
feeling nostalgia time passing I like the playfulness choreography, dancing in Derrida I trust him, or, in fact, I am jealous that he gets away with being so much himself, yet no-one ever calls him "personal" "Dialanguages" whatever that is in french, he talks about voice, his voice, and this particular problem of interviews: always artificial [what isn't?] Or he speaks of some sacrifice in the writing, a choice between what to keep, or what to put, or a kind of economy. Yes I know that. Tony was saying: "I used to think there was all the time in the world" yesterday. He puts some emphasis on doing. So that voice, is a condition of scarcity, that I cannot display my irridescent multi- colored self. I must choose; there is the one for the moment. Perhaps then I can make sense of co when she says I should stay away from what could be dismissed in the genre of the 'merely personal' There is a finding the voice. Okay, okay so let me play this idea of the voice At first there is this will towards the self, the self image the coming to self, the seeing self. It is a desire, a lust for self image. That is first always there when I make these words. Say nothing of purpose, function, message, communication; I give priority, pre-essence to the self and my seeing it. For I am the first one to read each thing it is that I write. But there is such a tension It is that inevitable paradox that emerges when anything infinite tries to finds its place in the world Yes, there is an anguish I feel at the passing of time. Can I say that in each moment, confronted with all the choice, I see myself in my manifold futures. Tony with all the time in the world; yet this paralysis, this inability to do anything, because to act, each act, is a choice, an destruction of each other self. I die infinitely in each infinitessimal moment that I am made. This anguish: there we find the voice. Let me say Derrida just so you don't think I'm lost. He speaks of it as a dream idiomatic writing "the voice, its timbre" He makes me think musically. Now I think of each moment the singer, each choice of inflection, the composerly choice of each note. What is to follow in the melody. There is one and only one note that is next. So there is a crisis of choice, the infinite, the death of the infinite, its collapse at the moment of the infinitessimal. It is watching the self come to be, its manifestation from its many folds. There is a powerlessness, that even though one has infinite choice, one must choose; one may not not choose. Fundamentally it is terror. I love myself; I lust for the sight of my image. Yet, in each moment that I see myself I loose infinitely more. So is the writerly act one of control, hubristic wresting from the inevitable wear of time a little power to make myself of myself? Singing: to have a voice Singing: to be dying that time is passing. An ornament, perhaps, of death: an exhaltation. Decay. So I place this having a voice and this writing for a voice, seeking the expression, seeing the self in this world; it is all morbid. I am nostalgic for the paradise of not choosing, the paradise immediately before the moment of choice. In that moment I am everything. I love myself infinitely; hate. derridaderridaderridaderridader I will move further from this initial morbid and perhaps not so fresh idea or perhaps I am lost in it. There was a moment I truly hated Derrida. I hated him because he was me. It was writing about women, feminitiy, the feminine. I couldn't stand it; I would not let his ideas form in my mind; I was closed. I did not want to have his ideas about this. And it is all because of who he is, or who I am, or who he is not. I won't let him have his thoughts because I see him in myself and the opposite. Indeed, I won't let myself have these thoughts either. Maybe I will play that it is a consequence of the masculine, that I will not let myself feel very often anything. This is certainly true; I am suspended in a numbness. ----- Okay let me out of a pause. I was worried that I was going too far into the personal, into that inditable, dismissable world, so I stopped writing. Too bad for you! and the world, those thoughts never thought and feelings never felt (if I could ever feel). Let me out into the logical consequent (the word ancillary came forth) of the selfish writing the singing in the shower perhaps, these dismissable things. It is the question of address, audience, that I know for certain at least one who will read this. Is there a certain way that writing, this mediated form is transformed in the face of the audience? Surely it must be so. It seems essential, fundamental, axiomatic and beyond question. But if I am finding myself, if I am making myself, making irreversable choices toward the collapse of my manifold selves and into an infinitessimal single self that I merely am in each moment of writing,,, then what about this other person? this silent voice? YOU What can I say? if in each word I am "becoming" -- De/luze -- then there must be a way in which You contribute or rather are a fundamental element of such a thing. Or let me question this becoming and place it into the world of the lacy entre-deux. Then I will say it is not me that is becoming, rather the becoming is against, inbetween me (and thus you). Can it be that we are both becoming, weaving in and out of each other in this text? I love this about our frenchman's interviews. The particular way in which his play refutes translation; it forces the translaters blatant interjection ["blatant" was a tough choice of words. The author was looking for something closer, more adjacent to "uninvisible" or "opaque"] Interruptions, punctuations, punctures of the needle inserted between pulling the thread, making of two. Yet there is always something untranslatable even between two speakers of the same language. I would say, even between Zach the author and Zach the reader in this very moment. I surprise myself; Derrida does too, I gather. Yes yes. There is a delicate balance between control and "improvisation" as our frenchman said before me. If we are to speak about dancing, choreography: who is dancing? Me and You! Even Me and You-that-is-me. There are rules. I suppose, in dancing, expectations, not stepping on eachother's feet. But it is no fun if there are no surprises; it is not dancing. How can I collect this constellation? You/me/the weaving of the entredeux. Improvisation, surprise, coming to be. Becoming and being surprised at becoming. Being terrified at becoming and seeking control. The infinite loss and powerlessness of becoming. Tony and I standing there together with all the time in the world.
back in after Recess co asked me to a be a bit more focused. I have been putting on the weight, now cut down to the muscle So let me have a structure, just to be clear. Let's have our buddy Giles over here. & Beethoven, my ever present interlocutor who is always behind my forward thoughts, and sometimes right at the front; he can live here. This side will be for me, and the class. Those personalities that make meaning possible. Nihil would tell me of this quote, one of Richard Feynman, advising to keep a few "unsolved" problems in the back of your mind as you learn new things. So I have read Deluze. I have read him thinking about Beethoven, this hero I have learned to worship. He is a hero I ought to Become. & How about this French stuff, so opaque in English but perhaps not much better in the lingua. It washes over me, like the colloidal sand in the undertow. I am smoothed by it, perhaps less defined, sharp. But there was one scratch, one interruption: The orchid and the bee: a clarity I keep. Almost, in a way, the only thing I can say I have. How I think "Becoming". It is about this third, always this third space. The orchid is not the bee, the bee not the orchid, rather, they both become something else, something independently outside either one, but also always and necessarily in between (entre deux). Instantly I think of the performer and Beethoven, and that last time in Nick's class when we watched the buffoon trying to play the Hammerklavier. We laughed; he was a joker. How could this be so? What was so absurd? So I question what makes this possible and I return to the idea of the text. Is it that third space? What is it to be unplayable? Music that is so impossible seems a paradox. It can only be so through the divorce (And here I see Deluze, the Nuptual, the Conjugal) of the composer and performer. That was once so intimate a bond, so united. When I think of Mozart the improvizer, never daring to play one of his pieces twice, and I think of Czerny, Beethoven's intimate friend, trusted to premier his works, yes, there is a different kind of becoming here. It is very fleshy, very real. It is the kind of becoming that is to be both at once. But maybe we are not becoming here, we already are. And I will take this distinction to start. That to become there must be a necessary separation. The bee must be so radically different, so entirely alien to the orchid, that it may thus become. There must then be a kind of alienation; an initial making separate, a divorce. Is it Freud (froid), and that exit from the womb, that making of another? First I must call him a sexist for he doesn't ask of the mother. If this is fit, the mother must lose something to, must be alienated too. But it is not so linear, composer-performer. There was not first the one and the other, so that is out. I was to talk of love, a kind of alien I am. Sharee says that I do not feel, or, I do not bear my emotion. This makes a distance, comes between us, does not allow us to unite. I have always been this way I have never let myself become. Thus, a distance between me and my partners, or, they have never been my partners, or, they have always been Mine in the way they are not my Partners. Always accessory to my first, premier, primary subjectivity. So I have never Loved if I have never become. The Nuptual: what would it be to become. Within a third space? Is it the procreative? Is it the genetic fluid union of gametes? Maybe at some discredible froid level. No, GD says, "neither a union, nor a juxtapostion" "birth" he says, synthesis, AND necessarily unpredictable "another direction" Orthoganal Style, Language, Mastery, Who am I to think of but this hero? The double capture. The stammering. If I am to be correct, I must place these things - s/l/m - outside of Beethoven, or let me call him Ludvig, and outside of our wiley performer, the professional, the Prof. Ludvig, the Prof, the each have their own ways of things. But they build together this thing that is Style. Language is that communication; it is the thing that enables the troisième entre deux. The entre deux, it looks like lace to me; it is ornate, domestic, woven. It is those often delicate threads, fragile, that tie us to one another. It is Nihil and those beercan tabs, the one I lost, and the one I pray he still has, for without it there is no hope. Beethoven, this hero that I am forced to be; my telos, and I hate it. The heros journey, he is the subject by which I am subject. He is the master of a language I must know. But to take him back, to call him Ludvig. The I say, "Beethoven is no man!" Beethoven is language. Elle est la langue; Il est l'homme. What of language? To stammer? To stammer in one's own style. Deluze gives me this. To speak ones' language like a foreigner, to speak another's like a native. There is no difference, because the language is always foreign and native, it is the lace, the thread in between. And so French may be mine just as ông standing outside the paris opera house is me. The language is bà because she is the lace, she holds me across my generation as con. We are all one, we all speak the same language with her. And ever do I stammer! I could never get it right! Oh that disappointment when I see her each time and she tries to speak to me and I don't understand. So then she stammers in my language! But then it is hers! and then it is ours! and what is it then to become! what is it? I know all that I don't know. I hate myself for learning Beethoven but not knowing tiếng Việt. So what is that fantasy? when I imagine myself, old, learning the sounds, trying to know the language I lost, the threads that were cut. She has long passed. I am no longer con. I am monseigneur, the prince. I stammer over the words and I become. I do not become her, as her. As her body, as her now ashes. I become her comme la langue. There is the wedding; I tie the knot avec elle. Between us, there is the infinite distance. Across I cast these lines to hold, under all the worlds forces. also, to make beautiful
Back again, again this glorious hour to think, to think & write write write Sharee read my work (these little things) this Saturday. It was one of those nights we sat and talked for endless hours I so admire her capacity to say anything about it. How difficult this writing must be to enter. What did she say? I know how to think in writing, through writing. Yes that is what is happening, I supposed. Something also, about this filter, a thing that comes between. She was referring to the analytic mode, the weaving into other thoughts. I suppose this is true. I do find it easier to write against, with- in, amongst. But these gestures, these stories that often open up and close my writing, it is they that show my open heart. -- No matter to it, to it! How about this Goddard fellow? So thick a text! Did I even read it all? It was so much and so cryptic, dense, so unclear, or at least, wanting for a purpose. Something began to emerge. It was a relationship with technology. I suppose the argument was that goddard questions the camera, the apparatus, the techno-box the mechanism itself. Is that it? There was some sort of lingering marxist inflection something about the cinema as a site of consumption, economy, which I suppose is quite true. I remember most recently, our director as a critique of this very element of cinema. They certainly talk a great deal about money. $$$ There! That was the theme. Cash, dollars, fat salaries. He spoke a lot about that which is something I never think at all about. (checkin' dat priviledge) They put across this cinema-as-economic-machine vibe. Which I might understand more if I had watched more of his films. I really couldn't put myself in this reading. It kept me away. The characters were so flaccid; they lacked a place to enter It bored me, frustrated me. What even is the context of these interviews. That there exists a book "goddard on goddard" makes me want to vomit. And that oft return to the "Left" As if! Maybe marxism just isn't of my time. Ah here I am. And here I am not. I can sense the filter. Or at least, I can sense that I am annoyed now. Where am I? Where am I in all of this. How can I be in all of this? goddard doesn't seem to give me a place to be, a space to dwell, an invitation to enter. Rather, I am left to feel bad for even watching coming to the cinema. What is the point of that? Am I in on the joke, the irony, the guilty consumer. I am sick of this. I don't even know what it is. But he doesn't inspire me to watch that's for sure. Maybe I can find something of myself in that conversation about technology. Maybe that will give me somewhere to be. .................... Ken ken ken ken ken I missed his performance this weekend. I would have gone with Sharee but we just blew the timing. Of course me; I'm never on top of anything. when was the last time I was anywhere at the right time? (early?) We had that conversation on a Wednesday, caught in the stairwell at Morrison (the music building if you don't know) He says the same things over and over again, but I don't really mind. Is there ever anything new? Priviledging of the live experience. That's his jam. I like it; it does influnce me a great deal, or at least causes me to question the putting forth of any musical objects. Though, the work/event binary is questionable as well. I don't think I understand at all whatever goddard was trying to say. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Be sincere return to an honest place Write from an honest place and be open. I've been dreaming a lot about being successful. Economically, that is. This is perhaps that growing angst at the coming closure of my utopic recess. That is to say College. I think about making music Are they music objects? Today I was imagining a performance, like a house show or a small gig-house and getting the audience to sing along. Yesterday I though of writing that piece for Nate to play. The thing on the piano, but also a computer component that I would write with that guy Jason I met at Sophie's b-day party, though I lost my phone so I'll have to ask her for his number which may be weird because maybe she doesn't want to talk to me but she's very polite so I think she'll do a good job playing it off anyway Then there's also making that album with Andrei. I fetishize that vinyl record. I want to truly write for it, into it. Work on it's shape, its length. There is something about acknowledging each different medium of communication. But then I suppose there is this capitalist tinge that underlies all of my creative directives. When I thought about writing that song-website, I considered "how am I going to make money off of this?" before concluding that I really can't or maybe that I don't want to, and will try and get away with it for as long as I can. But that thought! I had that thought I did! It intruded! There's no pure ideas for me anymore, everything blackened, fucked, by that cashcash It is a little impolite that goddard talks about money like that. Impolite but that is because I come from the place where I can be so polite. I remember Penelope from the OCF (haven't seen her in two weeks. I wouldn't know if she'd texted me anyway because of my damned dead phone). She mentioned money so many times, I lost count. I felt so damned bad that I didn't offer to buy her coffee. I did ask her out after all. I'm not a bloody feminist anyway, so what's the matter? Though I am so embarassed, I try not to show off my money either. But then what's with these white shirts huh? Oh there's no salvation! goddard surely doesn't have to talk about money. He could avoid it just like me. Sit in this cozy middle-class bubble acting like money doesn't define me one way or the other. But he does, and it is an intrusion, and it makes me uncomfortable because I like to avoid those thoughts. There was a moment where the author was writing about maoism or something else; class struggle. And I had the thought: I can't really be a communist; I am so defined by my class; I wouldn't give it up, live on the streets like those bUmS outside of cafe med. When I go to the theaters I don't think about how much I'm paying. The only reason I ask if I have to play to see the shows at Heartz hall is because it's such a damn hassle to find five bucks to give to the box office server. $ Honestly. Honestly. I am not here right now I doubt very much that I can be open. In the most private moments with myself I am still lying, still away from myself. The art, the media, I make these things to put myself just a little outside so I can see it. Far from transparent intermediary, these technologies work. Skeptical I can be. Maybe they don't give me any true self. Just an- other way to see it. I'm hiding these days. I'm scared of myself. The skin is so thick.
my writing my writing always improvisatory I was so certain, so certain, it was coming from the self; so certain that this is me! hey! Assia Djebar writes how? as a parenthesis? what could that mean? how can I understand such a distance from myself? or is it a ruse! a joke, an illusion by which she can remain safe, to talk of one's self as if on were talking of anybody else, as if there were no self to reveal! Andy Warhol plays the opposite trick. He plays as if he speaks so freely of himself, as if there weren't anything to hide. What an illusion. "I give you everything," he says, "vulgar, embarassing. See for yourself I have nothing to hide. I mustn't be lying, for then why would I show you this? I could make up anything, can't you see?" What is cool? Playing for the camera even when it there isn't one around. The perpetrators of cool are much safer when someone is watching. Then, at least, they don't seem so insane. So I write! And it is as dishonest as Andy Warhol: for I write knowing, just knowing, someone will read this. That is why it is so easy to write this for your class, co Minh-Ha, because I have you; I can count on you. & my friends, my friends, I show them this. It is, perhaps, as Assia Djebar would say, indecent. It is indecent to speak even at all, especially with the self at the center. I I | | what a world I invent, and for whom? I dreamed as I was walking here of starting a magazine. I would start it for back home, Washington, DC, or even it would be based out of Rockville, MD. How's that for a center. My town: my embarassing little suburb. Would I elevate it then? Bring it to some im- portance. I need more parentheses in my writing because (if what I said is true) I can be even more honest. I can give more of myself as I play that it is not myself. ((((((( A game: Some players make up a melody. One player makes up one melody. Just a lyrical line. Next we mash it up, force it into a box, the parallel interupted whatever The bass! Improvise that too & then someone should write it all down. The inner voices are the hardest, most tedious. Can we make them weird? That may be too much. I like this kind of play. Maybe more direction. Telos (Telos only exists in these fictional parenthetic worlds) ))))(I want to tell a story)(((((((((( He came to college. The girls the girls. Never before had he ruled the world like that. Of course there were the boys, brothers, stitched together at the heart with threads of gold and blood. The brothers were the base. The girls sang the melody - or - were sung, as it were once power got involved. To speak of love -- to speak love ----- That was imposible. He had no words. There never were words. Whose words? Love? Love was his grandmother, un/dying. Devotion beyond gold. Love was so immense. It was so impossible. No-one could ever meet It was Olympian: Iove. A god-given gift, and he, no god, though he thought so at times, could never be so arrogant as to try and match the divine. Brothers: that was close. A love against death, it was: a love that preceded Death. Brothers: they were the heros. Achilles as he battled the gods, the river Scamander, son of Poseidon. They fought, bled, and ultimately --- they died. Brother love is death. Or we must kill each other. It is not a life-giving love. It is a death defying love it too lives as an impossibility, but a very mortal one. There was never any room for the girls, though they came; they were let in for the festival. Always, though, they had to leave before the night, no matter how many days, or months that sun took to set. So the drama unfolded girls to pass the time brothers to slash away at the rushing river. Now, almost all has flown by. Water finds its way; brothers, they all die -- and so, too does he close his eyes. ))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
diScomfort: the academy. I get further within it, move inside & I wonder "where went honesty?" Who has told the truth lately? only if it comes from the heart is it true! All these liars! Charlatans! Players! Or do I say, "there is no truth; I am the biggest charlatan of them all: he who believes, he who has deceived even himself"? I still pray to the old god: Greatness, that masculine fiction. I will not be the king of monkeys! If you worship me I will hate you because no-one who lives on this Earth is worth my feet! "quote - unquote" These scholars, impotent, limp- dicked. Where is your music then? how do you answer to Beethoven? My theory! Give me William Carlos W. Let a man break into prose when he just can't keep up the illusion. But if prose is your Kingdom... What said W.C.W.? Prose is the finger pointing to the moon; Poetry will bring you the whole goddamn moon & I will settle for no less! Nicholas Mathew's farce: the dove flown to center court at Wimblydome. people laugh, shit their pants; it's the funniest thing in the world. But there must be stakes! oh the stakes! golden goblet! sacred sippy-cup! He's playing his whole damn life for the sacred sippy-cup, as if there are all the stakes of the world. Well fuck him. I say there is more truth in that damn dove descending upon that racist game than there is truth in the whole quote-unquote bloody world. Let me be the dove & Let me be the snipe& Let me be the sniper There's yours bloody dove
At last I was not successful. Not successful at reaching any truth about myself, any truth about the world, if there ever is any such thing. Can I ever honestly reach into myself? At this hour, so haggard and caffinated, sitting in a damn computer lab? Well deeper into formalism! no doubt it is the only way. I know I am a fool, but does this world have anything but fools? Visible dancing baffoons, and then fools that suffer silently. Oh, why am I now so romantic and absurd. ---------- Back to my the author, Helene Cixous & whatever she had to say about the Other, and other curious things. Let me take it all down, gather what came to me & let me weave it weave it through myself and see what bloody tapestry we'll have. Cixous works towards a kind of poetic writing. It is skeptical of theory, of ever thinking one can hold a thing, in words, wholly. Call it some kind of paradaox; not the eternal Dao. "Theory entails a discontinuity a cut, which is altogether the opposite of life" Okay, I will ponder these things bit by bit, element by element. I will work in a line, even if it is so unbecoming. I do it here don't I? Undermine my words, the perpetual skeptic. What would it even be, to say "I've got it! the goddamn definition. Quick write it down." But words all the same, words all the same, because, well, what else do I have? music I suppose; poems. I have lost those lately. I'm left with, what does Joseph Stroud say? The heart breaks into prose. It is what I am left with, now, no I am not strong. I am very frail these days. Let me be skeptical, in the way Cixous is, of whom she calls "theoretician, that is to say, as less woman" or less me, in the ways that I am, that are dear to me. That to write in such a sober style as is often asked of me in such classes as Nick Mathew's, is to amputate some of myself, remove, (I want to say castrate but I'm being careful). I am searching in these very letters for a style that lets me write all of me. Yes, I am naked here laid bare, or at least I am trying. I want such a violation to be possible. But is it ever possible? Even in the most calculated poetry have I gotten there? or am I always safe. I need to focus on what, in this interview, comes to be called "the interval space, the between, the in-between, the entredeux." This I interrogate as a special site of being. I say, "I am there! I live there!" and dare I say, "I am only there! outside of that entredeux, I am not! there is none of me!" Can I? Can I say that? So I have challenged these worlds in which we find Beethoven, Odysseus, so carefully made, so sure of themselves, so defined. & then we have a whole world of scholarship to say "this is just how Beethoven was" or "here! right here! Odysseus as a real historical man lived!" & so we build, so carefully the illusion, that these Men lived as Men, that they were so surely them & nobody else. The atom, unity; let us collect, archive, gather. I am just as skeptical as Charming Nick of the authors who say "oh we can know Beethoven more, more, if we just look at his times, his Context!" But maybe I am not a skeptic for the same reasons as the Dear Englishman. Rather, those authors are merely doing the same thing, only in new clothes; they invert the thing, try to say they are doing anything but building that one man, polishing that same old statue. Well, who am I? Am I not just writing about myself? No, because who I am is also the world. That if I write about the world, try and catch it wholly, it is just as futile, as doomed to failure as if I tried to catch myself, just as wholly. They are the same, as I know the one I know the other, and equally so. What words have I been turning over and over, trying to set for voices to sing? See yourself see yourself within the world See the world see the world into yourself Name the world name the world within yourself Name yourself name yourself into the world I don't fool myself into thinking I am wise. I only wonder why those words came to me, if I can find any meaning in them now; maybe give myself a reason to pick up the pen again. I've gone off; back to Cixous lest I lose myself. Those in the interview go on at length about the Other, an important question no doubt. The Other built into language, but in a way unsatisfying. There is a way we are wont to write the other, almost safely, in our text, subtly. Surely I even do it now; as I imagine who I am, I must imagine who I am not. To do so I must imagine whom an-Other is; I create. Every time I use that letter, "I", I am implying "not those Others." Wow, wow, what a trap that is set! They say this Cixous can undermine, subvert this continual reassertion of this Other. But she must do it in narrative, or some clever way she has found for herself. This is what the interlocutor calls the continual "cutting into pieces of I-me." In some paradoxical way, our author's writing acknowledges so barely, lays so bare the Other that it also so vulnerably asserts that individual. This must be both the I-me of our author and the I-me of the reader. I love, I love this word "entredeux!" because it points to a kind of textile! I have been playing with my metaphor of weaving for some time. Won't this just be a great addition! It is so delicate, a lace that is placed between-two, it joins, but oh so carefully, fragilly. It is to navigate an inbetween and to know that it is vulnerable. It is a rightly elevated, ornamented task & it calls the inbetween space a name closer to how it is. It tells us that this joining is fragile, that it must be cherished, that it must take time. That it must be worshiped. It is a kind of worship: the entredeux. I love it. Cixous places the entredeux close to a death, bereavement. It's so morbid! Why does she do that! A loss of a being, a loss of a part of my body, that is living in the entredeux. Is that so? Maybe this brings us to that suffering she speaks of later. She says that suffering is in a sense wherein life is most fully lived. That there is a joy in it. Heh, reminds me of Beethoven: "joy through suffering," poor deaf bloke. But maybe, this way of knowing the entredeux is a way of cherishing, of truely worshiping the suffering and so, as Cixous says, turning one's self from the victim of suffering to its subject. Embellishment then starts to look like a kind of literary task, like a way of treating a wound. So I am thus evicted from myself and I need to know how to live, so I write because it is just simply living. It is to pass the time, to be locked in a cell and to stay sane: singing. I am suffering! Yes, these days perhaps more than ever, I am suffering. And I do not know how to grieve. Natalia asked me to talk about it. She says, "it's kind of disturbing that you don't talk about it." But how? How can I find the words to place myself into the world? I am so displaced, so lost. That task of speaking, so familiar to me as "here I am, I know it, let me tell you", tranformed into mere sounds, the singing keep sane, it so foreign. Cixous says "we do not know how to suffer!" & surely that is true for me. No, I do not know. Am I suffering now? I say so. In a small way those words make it more true. But the immensity of this loss, this loss of love truer than I've ever had. I see these words as useless, cracked plastic. Sounds, shapes on a page. How can they capture this loss! Death. Death. Death. It is a death. Because there is no time; time has passed and there can be no return. It is all lost because time has passed. I cannot return. Repair is to go back in time. I have lost an-Other, most vivid, most real. In that loss, was also myself that I knew. It was a self that I knew as I was not this Other. Now, who am I? Can I say so surely I am not him? It is not so easy; he is just a memory now; he lives in me. To turn from so vividly not me to part of me, so wholly a part of me... Loving - not knowing. But now I can only love what I know. What I do not know is so immense, so enormous. It is the infinity of all that will pass in my absence. I only imagine it as what I do know. I am trapped within myself again & in that way I am not, I am: a little less. Death? because I am afraid. I fear the world that is beyond. I fear the world that is without. And here in these words I face Death. I name it, I call it into being. It is my death that lives here on this page. Am I a little less afraid? I don't know. I am changing & what is the fear? To know how much I will be different & how he will recognize me just a little less when we meet next. There I see the change, the loss. Yet, as I write I change. These words change me, they build some other, every time I name myself "I" against whom I may come to be, just a little more. Does the suffering - the story that I daren't speak of but abstractly - point to the theory, the idea? or does the theory give me the excuse to craft the story? This is the weaving (p. 28 heh) this is the distance covered, across astral planes, from the depths of the heart to the foolish imagined expanses of the mind. Quick! A joke. These blobs of text: they look so ugly to me now. Why do I bother like this. A little distraction I suppose, from the harshness of it all. Here I am in the OCF. Class is soon; can't be late; and the kids, the kids they want to print. They must hate me. Love is death: to be able to die; to be willing to die; to know the death will come. To take it. To let it come. And then it is to live. I grieve because I lived. Because I grieved I can say I lived. And living I know death will come
I can't say how long I was asleep for perhaps only an hour and a half. I know when I finally counted my way to 290, the sun was starting to gloss the white walls of my room. Looking at them now, it doesn't seem to hang much higher. I awoke from the most fantastical dream, one I hope to return to some day, though, damn it, I've forgotten all the details. I will have to make them up. I do remember how it ended, however. I was floating, above anything (maybe nothing) in a sea of other bodies. It was the culmination after a bunch of trials, immense sufferings, that I (the protagonist) had endured. There I was, amidst these souls. They were joking, at someones expense, saying "he doesn't know how to fall." This man, apparently, couldn't fall, he just kept floating. & it was so hilarious to my companions, just a few voices in an endless sea of floating bodies, endless. They all laid to face below, though we were so high above that there was no below to see. Why was it so foolish, that this man could not fall? It seems like a blessing to me. Are they the mob, shooting down the individual, the blessed one, because they are jealous? Or was he unable to fall because he was too afraid, failing to let go, accept that falling is the way. In any case, I joined in the laughter, now part of this massive fabric of floating bodies. They turned to me and asked what was so funny, what did I have to laugh about? And, because I had just gone through these trials, the most immense suffering and loss, and then emerged into this new timeless reality where everything was safe, where everybody was perpetually falling; I laughed because I was not alone, that my suffering should culminate in such and absurd universe, unchanging world; I laughed. Life was absurd. -------------------------------------------------------- So now I am awake, having slept hardly at all, after a week of intense labour and then fatigue & I'm back here. There is time to write. Later I will have to write again for co Minh-ha's class. I suppose I should be prudent, let this here be about that. What a curse! No time. Rodrigo asked me when I would write again. It appears, only when I have to. ----------- We read an interview for co's class. I cannot remember the names: Cixious? All I have are the initials: H.C. H.C. spoke of many things, the words floated, in a way, hard to theorize. I imagine my fellows in the class will be frustrated, that the text, at first, refuses arguments, analysis. Or maybe not. In her writing there is a perpetual subterfuge of language, an undermining of the natural oppositions within our words. For example, that suffering must be so bad, must be this unfortunate event, that it is to be lamented. She says no, that it can be made hilarious, that often it is the most important thing to happen to a person. This is not to undermine the suffering, to say that it is easy, rather, she makes the claim: one becomes not the victim of suffering, but the subject & I think this is important, that through the poetic act, the rewriting of language, even the word that contains the most immense bad, the word that lives on the extreme of opposition, can be turned towards 'what it is,' 'what is life.' That in the moments of the most suffering, we find hilarity, irony; I saw this in my dream. My character was so wraught, taken by the experiences earlier in the dream (those I now can only recall in affect) & then he was deposited in agonizing bliss, floating as an angel in heaven where all those sufferings were left meaningless. And what was there but to laugh? to release the absurdity of it. Perhaps it is that I misunderstand our theorist. This is how I awoke today. ------------------ I fear that maybe Rodrigo won't enjoy this too much. Could he even make it this far? Oh, but what is it! It is useless if I try and write for him. I need to write about Nihil. It is a need, I must, because there is something within me that I have to come to understand. Even more, there is a way that I am, that only exists through him, in relation to him & if I am to write about being, if I am to try and understand all of the ways that I am in the world, I must know this. Rodrigo is already objecting, but aren't you just writing about you feelings. Something, some objection that is not an objection. Well, listen, it is all the same to me; feelings, theory, they all come as one, and that is the point! When Nihil and I were talking, we would have these long conversations in a style crafted by the mastery of years. We could complete each other's thoughts; we used the words 'you' and 'I' interchangeably. I would say we really went on those mental journeys together, as one. I described once the way our minds would resonate, complete each other, as two waves, two wave functions, calculated such that as soon as one crested, the other would give, or the opposite. If you took the sum of these two functions, they would, at each moment, approximate 1; but neither one was always in control. There is a way in which Nihil made me -- some power by which I was able to understand who I was -- when he was around. I look to the reading for this week, and I think of the complex understanding of the 'other.' Our author talks about this negation, this absence that is known when we are confronted with the other; we are made to know exactly how much we are not, exactly in what ways we are not. I liked this very much. I wrote the thought in the margin: we are, we be-come, only as we know the other. Before we are named, before we meet the world, we are everything, the whole immesity of it all. It is with that name, it is as we meet the names of others, that we find out what we are not. When we are told what we are, we are being told, rather, the things that we are not. These are the same, yes, but the negation preceeds. Is that helpful? Do I come closer to understanding what I have lost in losing Nihil? It feels like I have lost some of myself. It feels as if there is a part of me removed, absent. But that isn't fair because I cannot call him mine. So I like this theory much better, because it lets me say "I have not lost a part of me, rather I have returned, in a small way, to that infinity with which I was born." That in losing this dearest love, I have come closer to that everything, that morbid everything. I fight that everything, carve into it, searching for the form of myself. & this metaphor makes it seem like such a foolish task, so useless. Of course it is to where we all return, this struggle for formation, formality, cannot be one. it is only a delay, this whole thing. But the loss remains. Can I say I am closer to death? Or is this all so foolish and self important? I am suspicious because now as I write, I am not feeling. My body is not moved, twisted, tumbled within these words. I am sober, above. ------------------------------- I had many things I wanted to write, but in this past week of torment I have forgotten them all. What is it to say "I will write about it"? Is it, "I will live this moment later"? Now is not for living, it seems, but later, there will always be more time. But there is no more time. It is over today. How frustrating, that I float, that I cannot cherish any one moment. & even here, as I write, I am always turning back, always trying to catch that life I did not live. Those thoughts are not any more important than what I could catch now. Only, there is the tragedy, that, once lost, they are gone forever. I am struck now by some image of a beach. How do I remember this? It lives both as a memory from childhood and with suspicion as a dream, an impostor that has come to assume reality. It is evening; the sun is setting. There is a greyness. I am in New York. With my father's family. My parents are still together. My father's parents are too. I see seagulls, was it the first time I saw them? And later we went back and I took a bath.
Sometimes you must write with a purpose. It isn't so bad. Co Minh-ha's class is tomorrow & for it I've read this chapter from a book on documentary by this writer, Bill Nichols It really was a great read. Bill Nichols is my knight, he's got my back. For some reason, my style this thing I've been cultivating, fits so neatly into what Nichols champions. Or this pomo thing that, I suppose, Frederick Jameson is all about. It looks like I'm just about a native son. So how to begin? Nichols constructs this dialectic between personal stories (he calls them complex, detail rich, textured) & universal ideas (which are sweeping things get lost in them, but also they are necessary) (oh, I'll just grab the quotes!) Let's start with this Social Subjectivity Nich puts us in a world between The self, closed off, singular against the community, built being built. So there are these seemingly contradictory words or at least combinations of words with a doubling "popular memory" "political community" We can package this paradoxical duality, these phrases of the in-between, with other ideas present in the text "epistemology of the moment" ---------------------------------------- Well, howdy, how... I finally looked up Donna Harraway's metaphor of the cyborg, this monstrous coalition of ideas, "affinities," a collition of truths, none innocent. Situated partial knowledges. Yes, yes, this works for me. It's funny how I've come this far & I can give so little credit to these others. For me, I was gifted this world, it was paved so smooth. I don't even notice it. I came to be like this so easily. It was safe enough for me to write from (what I thought was) myself, to centralize myself & now I've taken this new turn, I will not place myself in the center but this other thing, the inter/ inbetween It is just so damn natural for me now. I read Beethoven scholarship and it seems so unreal, that people would think to put their ideas out there in such a way, that it would seem useful, as tending toward the Truth even! ----------- I do not live in Nichols' world. I have not seen what he calls these 'reflexive documentaries' from which that for which he is advocating departs. I do get a sense for what these performative documentaries must be doing, that there is even a questioning of what is truth, that documentary is not a task of truth telling, rather, it is one of truth making. Truth is this thing that is built The author weaves it into being. I would say, that there is an element of the against, of weaving against, around, upon, in-between. So this process lives in that inter/stice. Thus, I do not bear a truth from myself, it does not emmanate from my all knowing author/ity. Instead, it is a thing we build with each other. It comes from trust, mutual affect/ion & it is fleeting, held only tenuously, even in just that moment. Something the timeliness of the film handles quite well. ----- I'm quite happy to have come upon this theory. It will be a nice warrior to use in my fight against this oh so ordinary Beethoven scholarship I have been contending with & that damn conservative music department! How useful it is to have this authority to defer too. But isn't that just a problem! that I am only so lucky, that I may write in this way that I do and still be taken seriously, come out of this with some authority. I need to work out this idea of trust, team, the community. It will be an important way of re-looking at how we handle this ethos business. 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 I'm not as lucid as usual right now. Call it fragmentary if you like. So I'll use the text as my friend. What a great use for a text, to help me through my thoguhts like this. Right now, I'm looking at Nichol's "discourses of sobriety." He never really unpacks it, though that is also a tenant of this style, that big ideas, if they exists at all, never are spoken for as if they could be understood fully. But I'll take this idea, see where it goes. The sense that there is just one way of presenting truth, of making knowledge, and being as a knower: this is something that I actively contend with, everytime I write. It is constricting, like a straight- jacket. This is why I must work myself into a trance, divine my words. It constrains me so. Nichols talks about "disciplinary forces" that police the concept of what is real, who has access to realism, history, Truth. (I feel a bit like I'm outside the Matrix though such an image does tend toward condescension.) Ahhhhh, this "tension between perfomance and document." Isn't that something happening here? It is my continual contention between me, Zach-who-is-writing & a continual pointing outside of myself, toward some other, (referent, would he say?) I suppose that way out is to construct an other world, a third world between my inner world, to which you the reader may only receive glimpses, and this outer 'true' world, that is anything but true, but on some level it is something we have found we can mostly agree upon. This is the delicate third world, the inter/stice, that fragile in-between & It is magical! You know that moment, about 15 minutes into a Coltrane solo? It isnt easy, really, to have the patience to get that far. Especially because he doesn't really seem to be doing much scales mostly, just playing over the changes. It really takes a while. It's only because I have the luxury of history that I trust him, that I am willing to stay for such a time. So he's doing this bullshit, mystic, trancelike, a silly ritual. We're all athiests by now; we don't believe in that! But he proves you wrong. Just when you might have given up hope, he get there. What is that? it's somewhere, somewhere special. I say it's the inbetween. He conjures up this world, this space that both he and I (for if it was just him I wouldn't have anything to write) can enter. Performative, performative, for sure. --------------------------------------------- - I don't know how much I can unpack Nichols. It's funny. In a way, I think because I agree with him so much, I don't really think much of his argument. It passes over me quite easily. If I was quite opposed to whatever he was saying, maybe I would be more attentive. But I live it, and I am tending toward living it more in all my work. For now, I am so completely unsatisfied with any other way of writing. I can turn to Nichols when I need someone to have my back. A warrior. A common cause.
Sorry Spinning spinning spinning into another this time on cocaine Why do we study music? Why do I study music? Is it a kind of devotion, a worship? Natalia says Habit is the first step towards worship Well my habits aren't particularly good. I was spinning out a metaphor earlier tonight. I played with this guy, Cocaine Max. He was a drummer. I was a little to assertive with my discipline. I wouldn't say I'm too disciplined. In fact, my rhythm is shit. So finally there's a drummer in the peach here to set some chords. I weighed on him, definitley. Eight Eight Five Eight Third five is an eight It's the same progression four times, just the third five is an eight I just want to jam man this just feels like homework Hehe, I do my homework in a way that doesn't feel like homework So Cocaine broke & We ended the night over a cigarette Natalia is there the whole time but very high not to mention how hard it is to be a woman in a musical space not necessarily inviting! I start the conversation about how the idealists placed mind over body Max said something earlier about how he wished his body would just disappear, that he could just be a mind, without a body Oh boy, classic white guy It's in me too.. What you were saying doesn't apply to music You need a body The german idealists put the mind over the body elevated form worshiped form What even is a groove? I thought about Beethoven diligently copying out Bach fugues he couldn't even hear just that motion, the body Did he connect to performers? What was it to him if they played music he couldn't hear? The two gods Mind and Body Worship Prayer and the Habit Beethoven copying each note Music you can't hear Hearing is the boundary between two worlds Outside the body, against the body, upon the skin. See is maximus Hear, touch, the membrane Inside, world inside Contradiction with sensing in the fyvian way, fifian, classical Go inside, taste, smell, exchange, reciprocation respiration metamorphoses, digestion Not yet have we reached the inner world the kingdomn of mind, but we tour circle around, through, major thoroughfares We can hardly make it, almost impossible Wessel came close charted the capillaries, smallest waterways but to go beyond I don't think you can navigate your way from Mind to Body It's definitely not in the petuitary gland or the pinneal gland haha Does Beethoven get to this, with His two themes, the two themes in the late style, what was that Rumph opus (109?) Counterpoint in Vivace, then the line ascending to B gets halted at A# interrupted by the Adagio Sonata Form, a tribute, but there's no rationality here or a different kind the Sonata Allegro the polis, Athens, glorious democracy Two ideas, fused, battled, beaten, domination, subjugation of the feminine, Athenean concerns This new Beethoven, he's not looking to merge these worlds Some worlds cannot unite; oil and water mind and body? Beethoven does not believe the puzzle can be won The god of form exposed a magician, tricks, Form cannot solve everything no, reason cannot take Beethoven out of his decaying body decaying form That membrane cannot be penetrated. stimulated, vibrated, yes diffusion, exchange, but only so far, not all the way to the mind. Worship worship prayer prayer that one I wrote for Milnes
Why do we study music? Why do we write about music? write music? I study Beethoven, I read the analysis of his counterpoint & I am jolted. I race home from the cafe taking a detour through moes to pick up some manuscript paper & Then hit my house to work out voices Part writing, voice leading So abstract, so of the mind but it does move me if only as a nerd I don't write about Beethoven to bring out some truth into the world this is not my science what use? I engage with this text the canon, the scholarship, for my own selfish satisfaction, but to do it, to be in this world, I need others who have come here made games here I mimick their dance they teach me to move on this earth & when I write, for myself and others it is to keep record to wear the path make it easier to move ---- -- ' Does ‎it go beyond? I don't have a problem with what Rumph writes I rather enjoy it, actually. He puts on, however, that air of truthmaking he plays the detective It's all rather unecessary. =========================== I do have designs for the whole thing. I want to change people move them, perhaps into being like me Or, it's not all that maybe, too, I seek the validation, the company When Natalia, diligent Natalia reads me she'll point to something, say that's me! Hey! We resound, move each other make real, each other bring into being each other as against, in between, I am a little less alone
I just met with Bogart this morning. I ran attrociously late. Perhaps, because I stayed up so late last night writing another one of these. Maybe I do not need beer to write like this, but what can I say? I've just drank coffee now. One drug for another. Sitting in the OCF here. I was hoping to see her at the desk. I think it's fair; She herself even told me what time and where to find her & It's good anyway, to come here. Ascetic in a way, though still on the computer, the publicity keeps me focused lest embarrased. I pulled up this weeks reading on our dear friend Ludvig. Some guy, a lesser Beethoven, Rumph, is writing about the contrapunctal style that emerged in the "Late" period. There is a play, Rumph makes, between the 'dynamics of sonata form' and the counterpoint. I am drawn to make metaphors (oh Nick, just beat me if you think this is a sin) The dynamism of the sonata: it is didactic, proscriptive (what do those words mean) it reminds me of the enlightenment effort to control the world wield it with the mind. Sonata form is rhetorical, argumentative, sophistic/ated. It places its terms forward and then proceeds to "work them out" It is teleological, true, but I believe counterpoint so is. It's telos is one of force, control, powerful conclusion. It is coercive; it's morality imposes. We are not free to interpret the conclusion make truth for ourselves. Let me call this the analytic style, put it against counterpoint as this very scientific approact to truthmaking. Counterpoint: I take it to be a much more open, flexible form of truth production. Rumph likens it to the church: sure. It is a text that is open. Maybe Beethoven is himself the diviner, then. He has special access to the heavens. Counterpoint is Baroque it has this ornamental quality; it inspires awe; it lends itself to interpretation as deified. The way in which Sonata-form is so didactical, so clear, it is popular, charitable: Democratic It plays into a kind of meritocratic liberal utopia. Sure, sure, it was in the courts & then the crusty salons but what was democracy to these people anyway? If Schiller loves Athens it is not a love for the slaves. Counterpoint moves away from this democracy into an autocracy monarchy. We have Beethoven with the divine right to rule. He is our infallible pope (& you see it in those 1930s hermenutics of him. if ever a god lived!) Maybe we can call counterpoint a kind of monopolization of truth. I suppose, one can, through grueling effort, analyze, pull apart the tune, but to what effect? Then, then one has to be literate; such a task is for the page & so on that page we still have a monopoly or oligarchy of interpreters, those with the right to interpret truth, make it. Can I so say that Sonata Form isn't like this? Well, there is, within it, that one right answer. It is the kind of thing "anyone" can access with enough attention if the themes are clear enough. Looking merely at the audible effect, well... I have to listen to these late quartets and sonatas to get the effect of the fugues but I suspect that I cannot access their forms in quite the same way. -----------00000000000000000000------------------- I will as I move forward, try and build this contrast between sonata form & counterpoint I will try and develop stylistically a literal example (metaphor) of the one and then the other so as to come to be able to see them, as I understand them, on the page. I will draw on those themes of the monopoly on knowledge and supposedly democratic knowledge (of which I am quite keptical) Perhaps I will be able to imagine these two worlds Beethoven was inhabiting. I am quite interested to see how a contrapunctal style of writing looks When I imagined it before, I do think I believed it to be impossible, not a task that language could accomplish. But there must be some ways in which I do it, weave themes in and out of each other, much differently than if I exposed each one at a time. So there. So there. I'm sorry reader, this was quite didactic, dry, probably not fun for anybody here. But if you made it this far I thank you dearly. .............. ........ .... .
18.02.15 after midnight tho Unlikely to get much writing in. Santi is going to call soon. I hung out with Natalia tonight for the first time since we decided not to be involved with each other... (like that) It was hard. It seemed harder on her than on me. I've got distractions: that cute girl at the desk outside of the OCF. N read my writing at Cafe Med. We met up at Sather Gate and walked there together. I saw the old Ellesworth crew, Steven, Grayson, and Ryan sitting just by the door. It was a looming anxiety but I couldn't break it to Natalia though she knew anyway. (I would keep glancing over to catch Steven online shopping. Addicted that guy is.) phonecall----------------43:02 Looks like Santi discovered his Swag, finally. It has so much to do with fucking, that thing. Something slight emerged in that conversation: the inter. He talked about this paragidm in architecture - client first - where the architect becomes the most perfect craftsman for an idea. Important, I think, in the way that it is humbling. I sureley do not like the superstar ("starchitect as Penelope at the OCF called it") way of treating space, projects, plans. Yet, this client first approach still reproduces much of the starchitect idea; It is merely a concession, a ceeding of power from the one party to the other. It fails to really change the structure, the architecture of the work. Can you see? That what was claimed as a rightful power of the architect before is now given to the client, that they are now asked to play this role. Perhaps this does result in difference, but that is merely by accident, I think. I can develop this thought better by offering the alternative I gave Santi. I'm taken to the concept of the e·pis·to·lar·y This is the metaphor I brought forth. In writing the letter, who is at the center? The sender, the addressee? Of course it is neither, that the letter lives in between. This is the inter/. So I take this metaphor into the world of architecture & actually I extract it further. All of my writings, works, take this form. I have assumed the epistolary relationship. Take this to be part of the Pronominal. Perhaps not as my english pronouns afford me to express (I, my, me do not embed in them the relation to the specific you), but the Pronominal as I have woven it. Let me remind you (my friendly readers, Natalia are you there? Santi have you finally come around to reading these?). The way that pronouns work in Vietnamese is my starting point: in this text and also in my life, that is how I first learned to know the world. Pronouns are generally two directional. In the way that I call Bà what I do, I imply that she call me "con" & take this out of the familial realm; strangers I meet, grey women, I call them, too, "Bà " & so they call me "con". This is the way in which the pronouncement builds the relationship, puts it into the world. That these expressions create an inbetween, a space between. So when I create this epistolary style, I mean to say that my references to myself understand you, they create you; that my references to myself are only possible, only capable of comprehension as you are, as I imagine you to be. So I look to this space of the inbetween, that the center does not point to me or you, but us together, and a specific us! I suppose there are degrees of this, there are the ways ‌in which I relate to those distant readers, those far off professors I plan to show this to in a few months, those imagined readers, those that I cannot now possibly imagine. Back to Santi, the architect (after I light this cigarette) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Nihil criticized me before of the way that I offer "advice" to my friends; that theres is an unsafeness, that they too are not challenged to criticize me & this is true, that I construct myself to be the swagmaster, safe, infallible I asked Natalia to give me straight up criticism of my previous entries into this & I was quite worried. Worried that it would impact my style, that an increased consciousness towards my technique would inhibit my work. Maybe so. Why is it that I had to bust out this stupid sierra nevada and this cigarette to find the flow that allows me to write? I did this again, when talking to Santi just now. Last night, he found himself unable to work on his project. He placed himself in studio for, what?, nine hours? all for naugsht. Diagnostic Zachary came to the rescue, that I said it was the lack of stake, of real rib-eye steak that was making his work impossible. I did, to my credit, gesture to my own experience. I have come to sit in this very style, this pensive, self-centered, (inter/ centered?) style, and be quite comfortable, feel quite safe, and free. I find this way of relating to projects, of placing them squarely in the inbetween begets ease. I look back to the days of Traveling Cadavers (my highschool band, if you don't know) & How very possible it was for me to write then. I don't think I've ever been so prolific in my work. This past semester was something close, writing with Natalia and Rodrigo. Some days it felt so impossibly easy, unfair even. There is a freedom that comes from placeing works between me and my friends. If there is trouble, I have a buddy who can save me. We can rely on each other, take care of each other. I want to elevate this form of thinking? being? place it squarely in the front. Even when I am working alone, I am thinking of others, of the inevitable other, the unavoidable other. I claim this for the Pronominal; this is a fundamental characteristic. In doing that, I suppose I am taking a stance; I am advocating for the Pronomial as a from of relating, understanding one's self against the work. Did I learn this from Ken (Ueno)(thà y Ken)? He does this thing in his composition classes; He introduces us to the performers that we are writing for. We know them! We can ask them questions. Telling, recently, I went to a performance, "curated" by Ken. Afterwards, Spencer & I and Ken and the floutist, all when to some bar in Soma. But I think before then, after the show, the guy opened up for questions & I asked him, what is fun for you? Was it so innocent a question? People laughed at it. There I go again, Prince Myshkin. I learned this from Ken, this way of relating, a way of knowing, coming to know those around me, those in my world. For me, as composer, it really is the most fundamental of questions. It is a very important factor that guides what I want to write, what I choose to write into the world. (If you want to know what he said: it was some delicate balance between keeping things varied, hard, interesting, worth the challenge, I suppose, was implied.) ------drum solo------ I'm losing it now, distracted, out of beer. Next week I will have to present in Nick's class on Beethoven, and counterpoint, and some guy's argument that he is making a conservative gesture, that counterpoint signifies the old, a kind of return to the glorious christian rule over europe. What is he going to argue? that by placing counterpoint against the classic symphonic forms, Beethoven is imagining some utopic solution? or maybe exploring some way of balancing the old and the new? Oh, I feel so disconnected from the task! If only I could find a way to write myself into it. I want to feel like it is mine.
Eating alone again. It is so damn delicious. Its tofu and spaghetti, pretty strange. Tomatoes, garlic, ginger; How have I gotten so damn good? But that thing missing; there's no body here to testify except for me. These lonely jazz tunes, sailing voices, sliding all over the place, searching; I let them fill my space up. I leave the door open hoping someone will save me, break this bubble that I'm in. Ran into Rosella after class today. It was the first Nile Project day; perhaps I was too critical in class. I wasn't the only one disappointed. Delightful: she was in Rodrigo's class with Juliette, last semester. I came in for the final presentations to play the guitar for Rodrigo, have his back. But then something beautiful. In that extra time after class, the margin, hanging, vulnerable to being clipped off, pruned, we came together to write a song. I played the coach in that way I've learned to do. Did she say it was the best discussion section ever? What an honor there! It's these little testamonies that allow me to believe in myself. I can't take a paycheck, or at least I haven't been looking for one; Can't look to that; Can't look to grants. I live in those little moments of assurance, gratitude. This is just another way that I am in between. Something of me lives in the inter/stice. I showed Rosella what I wrote about BÃ from a few days ago & She really got it; she was really appreciative that I could share like that. Oh what a paradox, that Writing from such a vulnerable place... It is the only way I have access at all. It is the only reason I have anything to say. Yes, yes, it is hard. But It is also very easy. It was hard to come to let go. It is an act of listening to ones self. For some, perhaps, it is the hardest thing to do, but me, so arrogant, so brazen; of course I love myself. Look at me. Here I am. But In that moment, I had to show her me. I had to give something. It was a way to show that it can be done. I will not speak to anyone's experience but my own. But in it, someone (you all) may come to meet me there, find that they move with these words. I need an audience after all & There is Rosella. It was her gift to me! reading that. ~~~~~~~~~~ more noodles ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ How should I go about structuring this thought. I put it pretty well on the roof of Kingman, smoking a spliff with Haley. Lovely She's always down to entertain my theories. I take the surnominal prenominal pronominal to gesture towards Different modes of being. Strangely, There are rather literate modes of being. Maybe not. Can I say, rather, that the preeminent mode of communication brings with it its dominant mode of being. I'm thinking only that writing, the literate, the page constructed Beethoven as such, as surnominal object, name towards idea. BÃ 's domestic world was taken over, overshadowed, dominated. What happened to me? First I knew Vietnamese, that first language of love, family, kinship & It was lost, overrun by english, this language in essence colonial, erasing & Verbal english no less, my mouth muscled into these few sounds, these consonants; no diacritics needed. As I came to write, as school became about these words, this text, the language moved into my hands, moved out of my heart, core & Came to rest in my head, hands, eyes. Beethoven, on the page? in the text. The text that goes beyond any one ink; The text that defeats its own manuscript. Copyerrors, editions, revisions, E flats in the double bass. So I will play these three kinds of names taking for each a champion: Beethoven, Odysseus, BÃ . Of course they all fight alongside their own small armies but they will lead. Toward what? Whither this theory of names
Just back from shopping with my dad. We bought a table set from Ikea. I was so embarrased to have bought it: $150. What for? embarrassed that my father will spend money to take care of me? It's a delicate place, not to be ungrateful & I definitely am taken care of. Perhaps it is the way in which these small interchangable gifts, these industrial gifts, produced on a mass scale, become all that there is to be greatful for. I told him I was seeing a therapist. He reacted about as I would expect, somewhat bewildered, I suppose, that I cannot share with him. It's a funny thing; when I went into Bogart's office, I told him I was there to talk about sex, or first I told him that I usually speak to my mother about most of my concerns in life, but that I have come to be unable to talk to her about sex. Bogart, a white guy basically interchangable with dad, said that was normal, it was not something that most of us talk to our mothers about. It really comes down to architecture. In my house there are more bedrooms than there ever were people. I have some distant memory of me, young, coming up to my parents locked bedroom door. I wasn't sure what was going on. Was I distraught? confused? I sometimes look back on that moment & blame myself for my parents failed marriage, that I was getting in the way, coming between. Was it a failure really? Is the only success to wait until one of you dies before the other? How is that winning? I would say that I turned out quite alright. Am I the result of their successful partnership? a success of their partnership? I do succeed their partnership. I am pulled away from my dad. I don't trust him to know Family. What is this skepticism? I think I place within him all that I find in myself, all that I distrust in myself regarding love and inter/. ----the beer already came; the cigarette now---- His father and his marriages, both ended in divorce. I see marriage as absurd; it is this fantasy, that I might ever be married. I don't believe in forever like that. I recently ended things with Natalia; just another thing I never told my dad. He never knew to begin with actually. Why? It was so good, so perfect. Was I scared? was I unwilling to commit. I look at Spencer, so able to give himself. He is such an available lover. Even I love him; I am not scared to love him. That perfection I had with Natalia, it pointed toward some infinity, some terrifying infinity. Ryan sent me an excerpt; (Natalia pronounces "excert" I can't really blame her; receipt, receet, recipie) David foster wallace: He writes of the "we"; this holy union of the "I"+"You" & this character, afraid, unable to give himself up. That word "pronounce:" pronoun, pronounce. Maybe there is something, a sonic element. That the pronominal is a condition of sound. Sound is this fleeting pointer, it decays, diffuses, collides with what is around it & In that collision it is annihilated. Sound must be produced, spoken; It must be brought to fore. There is something missing when I write "Ba" and not "BÃ ". Her name, its meaning, comes from who said it. The speaker, the speaking, sound gives the meaning. Pronounciation is so important. "Ba" could mean father; It could mean three. All about the tones, the pronounciation, this is the pronominal. Maybe there is a falsity when I am unwilling to say to Natalia "I love you". I tell myself, I tell her, that I feel it; it is in me; you needn't hear it; just know. But the pronouncement, the coming into the world that sound is, it transforms, it moves the universe. It is the very sounds I make, not the words, not the signification, but those vibrations in the air. The pronominal lives in those vibrations, so delicate, so very there, but so fleeting and fragile. BÃ lives, not in me, but outside of me, in these sounds. It is when I speak her name, really try to get it right, that she comes alive for me. Beethoven can live dead on a page, ink, stain, corpse of letters. His existence does not rely on me. But In a paradox, though, it does, In that way he is a musician. He needs others, he needs that sound. Music, our performative music, needs the pronouncement. I imagine that lonely deaf oaf, writing his beautiful quartets, but unable to put them into the world, not in any other way but his ink. Was it a kind of premature death? a death of something before the body, the corpse, the mind still moving, but something gone. //end flow
A quaint and hilarious break into chess.com. Something so delightful about games with Tony. I think I will leave my earlier rantings & Try to come to this with a fresher approach. To be in such an emotional hold is to be held. Pronomina: let me look at what there is & Holy fuck there was a lot. I can't even begin to know. I left southern california very suddenly the last time I came to visit my family. Bac Binh was there when I left, but Ba and Bac Hien were asleep. I left them a note. It said: "Ciao Ba, Ciao Hien, Em de hoc." Maybe it is kind of cute how badly I fucked up. Just now reading wikipedia on Vietnamese pronouns, I should have called myself con not em. Em is between siblings, what I would call myself to my brother. The other day I went to visit co Minh-ha in her office. I am strangely forward in how I interact with people like that. I feel very much like Prince Myshkin in these moments. So I came and we talked. It was so fun to see in what ways we relate. After some kind of theorizing or small talking, I asked her to ask me questions! Brazen perhaps but I felt it was the most honest thing I could do. At first she asked me about my name, I had been very intentional about writing my full name everywhere: Zachary Viet Pine. I wanted her to know that we had this connection, that it was even why I chose to take the class. What did she say: "does your name say something; half-half?" & It didn't offend me at all; I wanted her to know! We talked about our families; we both come from the north. There was a migration to the south. I asked her about her music; or did she ask me what I studied? We talked about that for a while, that she studied composition, then ethno. She said she always accepts music majors into her classes. Then she asked me how I heard about the class. It was so fun to say this to her! I was coy about it; Steven says I am good at being coy. "I took this class in the architecture department. It's a photography class. We took these weekly photos. It was taught by a guy named Jean-Paul." & That smile on her face when I said it. Hehe I can't help but recall that moment fondly. She said she would remember me to him. I hope they talk about me. Before I left, the last question I had to ask her; it was the question I came to ask. "How should I call you?" I suppose I could have looked it up. I would have avoided the mistake of first asking if I should use Bac & She said "co, co Minh-ha." How great! what a connection. It means so much to me now. Even, can I say, her work feels like it is mine! Her success feels like it is mine! We share a world, our own special world & Whatever I could come to achieve would be for her too, would be hers. This inter/space, this world we make for ourselves, between each other. Maybe it is the every day for her, so common place. But for me, Zachary, it is so unique. She is the only one, the only person not in my family I have this with. Even my own mother is not "me" but "mom". ----------------------------------------------------------------------- In thinking about Pronomina, I was reflecting on Ba. There is this looming task, that at the end of this semester I will have to write about "Late Beethoven." Lateness, oh dear; what is lateness to me? My life is so new, so fresh. But everytime I visit Ba I am confronted with Lateness; there is a coming to an end. Am I terrible for saying to? thinking so? I sit there with no words to say and holding her hand & All I can think of is how much I must cherish this moment. There is a speciality to every second, a rarity. Maybe it is a sin to write that into Beethoven, but why not? Beethoven is mine! and I can do with it what I want. If it gives me something, some meaning to read it this way, than fuck all who say I can't. Lateness has coded in it this imminent loss, this inevitable coming to an end. Must the Will to Motion always give way to the Will to Conclusion? Perhaps there is a way in which beginning and ending are always linked. I am quite happy resting in paradoxes in this way. I look to Ba as this spirit of the language. 420420420420420420420420420420420420420420420420 4204204204204204204204200420420420420420420420420 4204204204204204204204200420420420420420420420420 4204204204204204204204200420420420420420420420420 420420420420420420420420 I point to a way in which language is of the body. There is some way in which my words are an act of physicality. When I speak co Minh-ha's name, there is some force of... I have to pull the sounds out I have to inflect each word with a pitch I become a singing instrument & It is my physicality that resonates my shape My body is moved into being, moved in its being. In that ghost of Vietnamese that lives within me, what am I? It lives as these shapes, these distant memories, dreams. I hold them in my form, not as words, knowings.. I do not know this world, Vietnamese. I inhabit it, though. --- How do I feel about the lateness in Ba's years? I can see in her form something. Do I think she is ready? Ready? There is something in lateness about readiness, preparedness. It is a preparedness for nothing, for the absense of something. There is an imminence for the coming absence. So what is it I feel I will be losing, offering up. Oh dear Ba, she holds the family together. Her name possesses us all. It holds us across generations. The only name given by all generations. She holds a pronominal centrality. My brother and my cousins are mine by virtue of Ba; that we all call her Ba. My mother and her siblings likewise, Me. Our togetherness is owned in her & It is true, owned in the memory of her. So we see something that lives beyond the body. The pronominal as an extension of the Prenominal. I don't even know her name!! She is but Ba to me, and even to my father! who knows her through me; he gives her name through me. Merely her name, that name I don't know, does not work to hold together. It does not connect me to my cousins, even my father. But her proname, that kinship strength. It represents a being & what is that being in lateness? Lateness is in a way a condition of the body. It is worn in the body. But the proname is not of the body. The proname is between bodies. Lateness is given through the proname; it is transported to me. This transport is by virtue of the proname. When I see oldness around me, it is static. The old man on the street (appelled) is static for me. He is old always as I know him. He is not late for there is only an imagined early, or maybe I don't even imagine it. If I am careless, he is all he is now. Those cafe med regulars, static tableau. They are merely prenames to me, the float, Johns. But Ba was always Ba, even before I came into her world. Her name pro/ceeded me. Ba because she made me. <<33<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3 In lateness is there a coming to the proname? a returning? Does lateness make the proname meaningful? What of those eternal beings? Take me to the mythic gods of greece or even the many names of Allah. Are these pronominal relationships? I think of the grey-eyed Athena. How many other names did she have? She was not in a pronominal relationship with any mortal. There was no proname for her, because such a relationship is bidirectional (not necessarily bijective). Occasionally a hero, Odysseus perhaps, would come into naming & He would thus be the subject of heroic stories in that very naming. Odysseus: a prenominal character. When I play with these creatures, they are so malleable. I can tell any stories about them I wish. Mythos is such a plastic world, it can move. Any bard so adept can change the course of the tale, write the new mythology. I can make these characters my own. Who was that playwrite who found a trick to save Helen's virtue? They did it with Mary. Write into the world a story otherwise impossible. There certainly is a power to these prenominal stories. Maybe they are of all stories; all stories are of this kind. What stories are there of Ba? All I can remember, Ong was in prison, political prison. I don't know if it was the French. I think it was some Vietnamese political party. Five years he was in prison & Ba, did she have children? Those first two boys? She was forced to live in a shack? or Some small structure on the property. Treated like a dog did mom say? Poorly taken care of I'm sure. I don't think she ever forgave that family for that, Ong's family. Maybe she did not have to. Mom's grandmother; she did have two but I only know one. It must have been Ong's mother right? That was the woman! & Poor Ba had to live with her. Mom said her grandmother and her would fan each other. or Maybe just mom fanned her. That is the only image I see. How strange that mom's memories have come to me. Do we do this? put our memories into each other. Remembering things together like this. These are not epic stories, tall tales. They are simple records to families, of being together. They are not morally directed. They do not build into the world an ethics. Or At least not such a platitudinal one. It is an ethics of the each other. The Odyssey is a story of hospitality. It writes into the world the divine code between kings. but These stories, they write me into the world. Where Ba is placed, I am too. There is that way in which we are one, Ba and I & It is no bijective because they too place my brother into the world. My cousins and I come to visit this distant land in the North. I don't think even my mother has ever been there. But She is there in these stories of Ba. The mythic story, the prenominal story places the man. They make the man in his world: some guy, Odie. These kinship stories, these pronominal stories, they place me! I come into the world, because we are one, Ba and I: one family. In her lateness, Ba's names separate out. Her prename moves into this world of tales, of fictions. They would become stories for the news paper, biographies. If only Ba was so heroic. ( I envy those people who copy the stories of their families. They elevate these humble folk to the heroes of the wine dark sea. Ba and I speak no common language. This task is not one I can do. Instead I will remember Ba on the same day everyone else remembers Ba. We will burn the same incense at the same temple. ) Her prename can be found in the census section of the library. ( I think it's in that hallway right when you enter Main Stacks from Moffitt. Oh the filthy things that library has seen me do! ) If new stories are invented, they will be added on, as history. They will be new clothes for a corpse. They will be jesus made up on the cross for the cameras. But her proname, it will live. It will live in me, at least as long as I live. It does not leave this world, it remains. But without the body, without the material, where does it live? Not even in these books, these census books. There they do not write Ba. Her proname lives on in me, us, the bearers of that. Those stories are merely testaments to her name. Odysseus is his Odyssey. Those stories merely point to Ba. I point to Ba.
I sit now in Tony's room to ponder my theoretical question. What was it again that I began to write; the pronominal, on Pronomina. There is something about dignity going on, outside the theory itself, if there can ever be such a place. There is some experience I seek to elevate, some part of me. The last time I used that word, dignity, was in Nick Mathew's class. Actually it was just now in Tony's room as we were talking about something. We were talking about making a videogame, a videogame that put our worlds on display. I contrasted Dignity with the Exotic. We joked about a metatheory that might be necessary even before I can write what I want to write now. Wouldn't that just be unfair though, if I had to do that? So I said something about how I want to write from my experience, elevate my world to this level. It is a Beethovinian (see: surnominal) level that I want to engage in & Before you say something about being colonized and selling out or something, just allow it. This is a hard world to navigate and these things of prestige are very complex. I don't quite have a strong way to handle them now. Just earlier even I was talking to Eileen. We were talking about the future, a very late college thing to do & I mentioned being a music teacher for young children and how I was put off by it. For some reason, I can't help but feel that I am condecending to do this. There is an immature relationship with Dignity hidden in there. But about my theory: the Pronominal; I want to put my world on the dignified stage. I want to make a space that I have priviledge access to, that makes me and people like me special. This takes me back to Nick's class. Why did I say it? He said something so offensive, so politically incorrect that all of my friends scoff in its retelling. I have repeated it so many times that I can't even quote it properly. It was someting about the state of scholarship, on being a scholar & He talked of how, as scholars, we reproduce the system of values of our institution. He said it so plainly, as if it was of no consequence. It was useless to say anything but I did anyway; in that room he is the despot & That is where I used this word Dignity. I said "there is something I need to assert, my dignity, in doing this scholarship." That week we just read Schiller; what he says about women! can you believe it? Did we discuss it in class? But tangentially. What of the dignity of those women in that class? Could they even have said anything if they wanted to under the reign of that despot? For me it is not quite the same, but it is almost so. I think of the japanese; one hundred thousand singing the 9th symphony. What a bow to colonial power; sucking the bloody dick of the far west. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. When I taught piano to that kid, that club I was in, saturated with these Engineers. Good Asian kids on track to getting that good job. They still practice the violin. This club is just a resume padder. If I write about Beethoven, try and make a contribution to 200 years of deification, where is my dignity? How can I just assimilate into this theoretical practice? How can I just take it? But I can't leave it either, just go along my way, act like nothing is happening. I need to burn the whole building down. I need to do something irreverent, blasphemous. I need to spit in the face of german idealist jesus. After me, they will know who to answer to.
hf7y --- ZVP --- 2013