September 30, 2004
September 18, 2004
violet lotus
Influenced by the gloomy skies, I made some very colorful collages today. I like the first one the best:
I have a problem with the "finishedness" of the whole artwork. Even though there are plenty of messy random elements. I still want to zoom in and search for the real abstractions. They seem so very mysterious. A project for another day.
September 04, 2004
owls (stuttering)
Owls often make it difficult to speak Cree with them. They can cause stuttering, and when stuttering is going on they are attracted to it. It is said that stuttering is laughable to owls. Yet this can work to the Cree's advantage as well, for if you think an owl is causing trouble in your village, then go stutter in the woods. There's a good chance an owl will arrive. Then you can confront this owl, question it, argue with it, perhaps solve the problem. (88)
Quoted in The Spell of the Sensuous, Abram
From Harry Norman, "Crow Ducks and Other Wandering Talk,"
in David M. Guss, ed., The Language of the Birds
PS. I wrote a poem about stuttering once that had a pigeon in it. I never understood the connection, but it seemed to be okay and I never changed the poem. Maybe as owls, so pigeons.
September 03, 2004
intent
Prior to all our verbal reflections, at the level of our spontaneous, sensorial engagement with the world around us, we are all animists. (57)
imagination is from the first an attribute of the senses themselves. (58)
Like suburbanites after a hurricane, we find ourselves alive in a living field of powers far more expressive and diverse than the strictly human sphere to which we are accustomed. (65)
...the gestural genesis of language, the way that communicative meaning is first incarnate in the gestures by which the body spontaneously expresses feelings and responds to changes in its affective environment. (74)
Merleau-Ponty suggests that such a view of language [as a formal system readily detachable from the act of speaking] could arise only at a time when the fresh creation of meaning has become a rare occurrence, a time when people commonly speak in conventional, ready-made ways "which demand from us no real effort of expression and ... demand from our listeners no real effort of comprehension"--at a time, in short, when meaning has become impoverished. (77)
at the most primordial level of sensuous, bodily experience, we find ourselves in an expressive, gesturing landscape, in a world that speaks. (81)
Ultimately, it is not human language that is primary, but rather the sensuous, perceptual life-world, whose wild, participatory logic ramifies and elaborates itself in language.
That it is being that speaks within us and not we who speak of being. (86)
--From The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram
