(no subject)

[proximoception]

I do think that both, when you'd read enough to enter the zone they inhabit, had the remarkable virtue of recreating in their different ways a nakedness I used to feel fairly often. Maybe a lot of authors do, and it's just something you can't reexperience when you go back - you can forget all the lines, all the incidents and the text stays clothed regardless. I'd read the Odessa half of Babel and the madhouse portion of Clare, but hadn't seen much of these other selves, hadn't really met them.

I remember trying to explain the nakedness I mean when I was a kid. It was mostly a morning phenomenon where you put pants and a shirt on but still felt naked - the clothes were just on you, not part of you. Some kind of uncontrolled element proper clothing protects from seeped right through.

People would look at me funny when I said this to find out if they'd felt it too. They'd give me the same look when I tried to describe how my teeth and jaws sometimes solidified the world until it was part of them and hence me, and also when I'd talk about how different times had different flavors. It wasn't quite rejection, more like I was saying something just off enough from something they themselves recognized that the vocabulary gap put them in a state of hesitation about whether I was like them and they were like me deep enough in that some fundamental relations would need to be rewritten. I think I fell for literature as entirely as I did when I found it's about this class of sensations, that it could articulate them: Emerson's monad moods, Tennyson lingering on the lawn, Shelley in autumn. It was sad when I looked for nakedness, solidity, flavor I'd shared with Turgenev and found much of it was gone.

Though I'm kind of glad I don't feel naked in the morning anymore, even undressed. (Though the world does feel jarringly frameless when I wake at night, especially if the sleep has been short. Would I have associated those feelings once?) Or maybe it's that I got used to being naked? Hard to tell now just what I meant by the word, since the word itself is interfused so thoroughly with the now tattered memory of that feeling. If it had something to do with growing, of my body not being quite where I'd left it the night before, perhaps I'll experience it again as dilapidation accelerates.

And now part of me wonders if all I can attest is that the writings of Babel and Clare are intimate and awkward. The problem with internal difference / where the meanings are is that we use the same dictionary as elsewhere. Over and over we're shanghaied in the English of the day. And fail to notice just how cold that hillside is, once we've sprouted our grownup sweaters.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Deleuze and Guittari are interested in the body without organs, those who feel that way, those who feel made of glass, inorganic, brittle, shatterable. I think I know or remember something like what you mean, but it was rarely associated with literature for me, since it was so much about senses not shared as far as I could see. Later, much later, in grad school, I might have seen it. In Bishop, some, in Babel for sure. Buy then it might have been mixed up with language (and trying to talk about acid, refining my memories of tripping, etc.)

I wonder what you'd think of J.G. Ballard's novel The Crystal World?

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

All too organic, was the naked feeling. And the solid one isn't a brittle sort of solid.

Strong drug experiences can resemble the naked one, especially the early and late stages. I remember the whole world seeming like it had a compacted aspect ratio the day after that bad one, all squatly anamorphed, if that's the term - a bit like the last image of the Parabox episode of Futurama when the box gets sat on. And yet everything was proportional - proportional and yet all somehow squat. In relation to something that wasn't there, I guess - like I expected a taller world.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Yes, I definitely recogniza that last one.

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

I was going to try and say something or other on this subject but missed it at the time. Similarities, that kind of thing. But still different, somehow. So, may I link here from an entry I may or may not but will probably write? Don´t worry, it´s not as if your site would then be swarmed by thousands of eager readers, the odd few who actually read my stuff are all people I feel I can guarantee for, though.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Sure thing, feel free to.