Re: <documenta X><blast>Still
Morgan Garwood (mgarwood@inch.com)
Sun, 27 Jul 1997 09:36:52 -0400
At 04:12 AM 7/27/97 -0400, you wrote:
>
>
>On Tue, 22 Jul 1997, Keller Ann Easterling wrote:
>>
> Still, the kinds of poetry that one finds in
>> vernacular speech or some of the very beautiful entries in this log (I
>> actually was thinking of some of yours, Eve) which reflect more accurately
>> some of the actual working of memory, mind, body relationship etc. always
>> struggle against the official structure of our occidental language. So
>> often it seems that these very common and simple skills we all have are
> "I didn't mean anything by it."
> ******************************
> And the language of poetry in all languages struggles against the
>ossified and inert spaces which have come to inhabit the words. Word as
>sower of seeds - exile et emigre - word as sword against the dead anagrams
>of the everyday. And yes, one must also be alert and astute for the those
>words and phrases which escape out of the banality of la quotidien. Where
>once in a while a glittering phrases jumps out and to the listening ear,
>agains the reckless speech of signs, one hears the broken formats of
>speech emerge. A poetic truth which glistens. Last year I knew a woman,
>not a very well-read woman, not a well-educated lady, a working woman all
>her life (and a working woman never paid a salary for her work), who
>took ill. She began to have pains in her chest and stomach area. A few
>hours later she was in an intensive care unit. Later, when I and some
>others went to visit her, she described her pain in this way.
> I said what was that you felt?
> She said - It was as if a steel building (a steel building!) was
>pushing itself into my chest.
> The next day I asked her the same question.
> She said it was if a metal building had pushed into her.
> Over the course of the next few days it modified until it became
> Stone, concrete, brick.
> When she described the image of the Steel building I thought I had
>never heard anything like this before.
> I exclaimed to her: A steel building, and she said yes, steel.
> I went home later and wept.
> Language had spoken through this tough woman, this woman whose
>pain had felt like crushing steel in her chest. She had never seen a steel
>building, nor had I. There was an archictecture of pain in her words, her
>eyes, her face. Words, via the vehicle of physical suffering, had
>transcended the everyday use of them.
> She recovered by the way, completely.
> "All words are seeds waiting for the planter of talk."
> CD
In McLuhan's frame of reference, her metaphor, her inner life, was wearing you.