(no subject)

[proximoception]

But are literary works directed against ephebes? Is the struggle just a phantom one, or a real one? (Or, anyway, two successive and complementary phantom ones?)

Or only in the sense that any engaged reader is an ephebe - the attempt is made to replace the reader's thoughts with what cannot be reformulated differently without loss, so that the text forever captures a feeling, so that this captivity is noticed whenever the feeling is felt, so that to remember the captivity is to remember the name of a writer?

I need to think there is more generosity here. Shelley (e.g.) wanted me to see the world his way because it was true and needful to do so, not just his. And even the most confident, intelligent authors are still asking you, aren't they: isn't it like this? Don't you find it's just this way? Or perhaps it just works out that way - the best thing you can say to be remembered is the truth. Anything else can be fought off, transcended; the best Poe could hope would be to speak to some stage almost everyone goes through. Immortality-seekers smarter than Poe wouldn't want that. It would feel like mere graffiti, like an honorary mention. To be remembered as teacher and friend would be remarkable.

---

Put to writing that by the question of who is the demiurge, the precursor or ephebe? The ephebe becomes it in relation to the purer vision of the precursor, which she refuses to merely repeat but finds that she cannot improve on, therefore maims (reconstitutes and then maims in her own work!) in order to feel/deceive-readers-to-feel her work corrects it. But the precursor is the demiurge from the ephebe's perspective, both in the weaker sense of having marred the purity of what the ephebe should have been able to write by writing it first, and in the more classically culpable one of having passed on a vision they had maimed - either that of their own precursor or whatever rich world-given earliness we latecomers can't see for the noisy dead in the way. But the ephebe secretly knows her crime - the arc of the completed poetic career is a sort of confession. What does the precursor know, as precursor? (Loop to beginning above.)

Comments

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about this post a good deal. Thanks for it.