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Mar. 18th, 2015 05:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionPosted this last year, left it private because I assumed it was trivial or unintelligible or something:
Permission.
I and I'm not alone have trouble speaking sans permission. Someone tells you how you should feel about Shelley and suddenly you have permission for your heavy or light qualification of their saying how you should to become a speaking how you do. [See what I mean about unintelligible? I'm basically saying a statement reacting to someone else's can give you a chance to put into speech something important but difficult that you've really wanted to but felt unqualified or otherwise embarrassed to). In part because it's a speaking, not the speaking. To go from silence to the thing you ought to say is humiliating, impossible. But a mock-up is acceptable in defense. Is an improvement over the version they offer, rather than, because never than, of the one you ought to have. [I.e. your version is never as good as what you ought to have said - but is A communicable version - whereas silence cannot be - thus might wake up in others the same sort of connection to the expression-eluding phenomenon you hold, permitting them to understand it, or maybe just you, and then maybe help you understand it better too in their own responses.]
Another permission is someone directly asks. In a way where you don't think they're daring you to correct to correct your dare, the sneak. [I guess I meant something like "you don't think they're daring you to correct some common and wrong take on a matter of profound interest to you in order to then immediately correct your correction, which would be dismaying, since you'd be revealing something about yourself rather than just arguing some factual matter."] But directly ask you and just you something they couldn't possibly care about but you know you could make them. Know only because you haven't yet questioned just how you could know that you know you could make them. [That is to say, your questioning yourself is part of what destroys your ability to speak, in these instances; being "called on" distracts you from the Zeno's paradox of explaining what all words seem to cheapen or obscure.]
It's more this that makes it all come out of others than that they know so much more and the labor of ages et cetera. [I'm basically slightly disagreeing with Bloom, by suggesting that it's not so much that others' thoughts give us our own as that the shame of speaking what we think on a level beneath speech, maybe beneath awareness most of the time, is overcome only by the prospect of the greater shame of letting someone else get away with putting them into words we know are wrong. Browning gets to maim Shelley's stated vision because he feels Shelley's vision maimed his own unstated one.] It's that we need their permission. Not where they say I permit you but these chances, these other chances where what you merely want to prove tricks you into saying what you truly want to say.
Not that any of that's truly incompatible with Bloom, since the problem with presenting a vision through a rejoinder is that rejoinders always emphasize the areas of error, bring in only those aspects of the thing gotten wrong that are needed to correct them. And of course are not always correct - Browning's insistence that completion is found in heaven is a bad rejoinder. But let him blend Shelley's visions of completion with lights of our own that Shelley either didn't know or forgot or didn't emphasize in his own rejoinders to Milton and Wordsworth.
Seems related to what I was reaching for with the zombies. More on this soon, maybe.
Permission.
I and I'm not alone have trouble speaking sans permission. Someone tells you how you should feel about Shelley and suddenly you have permission for your heavy or light qualification of their saying how you should to become a speaking how you do. [See what I mean about unintelligible? I'm basically saying a statement reacting to someone else's can give you a chance to put into speech something important but difficult that you've really wanted to but felt unqualified or otherwise embarrassed to). In part because it's a speaking, not the speaking. To go from silence to the thing you ought to say is humiliating, impossible. But a mock-up is acceptable in defense. Is an improvement over the version they offer, rather than, because never than, of the one you ought to have. [I.e. your version is never as good as what you ought to have said - but is A communicable version - whereas silence cannot be - thus might wake up in others the same sort of connection to the expression-eluding phenomenon you hold, permitting them to understand it, or maybe just you, and then maybe help you understand it better too in their own responses.]
Another permission is someone directly asks. In a way where you don't think they're daring you to correct to correct your dare, the sneak. [I guess I meant something like "you don't think they're daring you to correct some common and wrong take on a matter of profound interest to you in order to then immediately correct your correction, which would be dismaying, since you'd be revealing something about yourself rather than just arguing some factual matter."] But directly ask you and just you something they couldn't possibly care about but you know you could make them. Know only because you haven't yet questioned just how you could know that you know you could make them. [That is to say, your questioning yourself is part of what destroys your ability to speak, in these instances; being "called on" distracts you from the Zeno's paradox of explaining what all words seem to cheapen or obscure.]
It's more this that makes it all come out of others than that they know so much more and the labor of ages et cetera. [I'm basically slightly disagreeing with Bloom, by suggesting that it's not so much that others' thoughts give us our own as that the shame of speaking what we think on a level beneath speech, maybe beneath awareness most of the time, is overcome only by the prospect of the greater shame of letting someone else get away with putting them into words we know are wrong. Browning gets to maim Shelley's stated vision because he feels Shelley's vision maimed his own unstated one.] It's that we need their permission. Not where they say I permit you but these chances, these other chances where what you merely want to prove tricks you into saying what you truly want to say.
Not that any of that's truly incompatible with Bloom, since the problem with presenting a vision through a rejoinder is that rejoinders always emphasize the areas of error, bring in only those aspects of the thing gotten wrong that are needed to correct them. And of course are not always correct - Browning's insistence that completion is found in heaven is a bad rejoinder. But let him blend Shelley's visions of completion with lights of our own that Shelley either didn't know or forgot or didn't emphasize in his own rejoinders to Milton and Wordsworth.
Seems related to what I was reaching for with the zombies. More on this soon, maybe.
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no subject
Date: 2015-03-18 11:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-29 06:21 pm (UTC)But I think the permission problem comes up most when we're speaking of the more essential things. Which Josephine eventually does, but it's a mighty effort - maybe the most astonishing thing about that story is its walking us from a place of arbitrary narrative authority back into our own problems at such a steady pace. Making us feel both kinds of surprise about their distance, that the gulf is so wide and yet not categorical.
This may be less about influence than the basic embarassments of art, something most easily overcome when you've been doing it quite a while. Have forgotten how impossible it is to think little you and your silly lies can touch anywhere near the center. But the people who put in the 10,000 hours are seldom the ones who even wanted to touch the center, and those that did want to seldom make it - perhaps just Kafka and some poets. Shakespeare and Chekhov started sold-out, seemed to have had no inkling they'd ever even want to buy their way in. Perhaps we can liken them to non-leaders who gradually come to realize that if they don't lead no one or idiots will.
Tolstoy was never embarrassed in the slightest and I think that may be what's most amazing about him, or what allows what is. He just accepted the center was everywhere, or maybe that it was anywhere he himself was.
All of this being complicated by how many stand-ins for the center are culturally available. Offering the sense of touching it without the shame and other illnesses. We always have permission to speak cliches, or countercliches and counters to those.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-02 09:54 am (UTC)