Re: <documenta X><blast>Words Wearing Us
Morgan Garwood (mgarwood@inch.com)
Sun, 27 Jul 1997 09:51:14 -0400
At 12:32 PM 7/27/97 +0400, you wrote:
>Clifford Duffy wrote at 27.07.97:
>>Words are also
>> bodies with sexes and places, names and colours.
>
>Yes, but the archaic ability to
>apprehend words as 'bodies' has
>been saved only in certain cases.
>
>Russian psychiatrist A.R.Luria described
>'absolut' memory (The mind of a mnemonist.
>Cambridge, Massachusets and London, 1987) of
>his patient, mnemonist Sh. (Shereshevsky) who,
>like Funes in Borges story, can remember
>everything. Sh. had eidetic memory. When
>Sh. had to recall something (words, numbers,
>formulas) he reconstructed 'syllabic' route by
>replacement words, syllables for the
>images which he arranged along streets.
>The road of mnemonist always took him to the
>house of his childhood.
>
>>To speak the space of words in their
>> interior movement, to shudder at their inner desire, to let the space
>> between them filter through to us in their inter-subjectivity and
>tension.
>> Then their auras, their halos will join us, and be one more piece
>> carrying us on our adventure to a new world.
>> "All words are restless grains and gods waiting to be opened."
>
>Yes, but the mechanism of substitution,
>in a case of mnemonist Sh., for example,
>in a case of eidetic memory, based on
>random correspondence between words
>and things. The coomon is a notion of
>space (or a metaphor of space), articulated
>as a differnce and similarity between
>readable and visible world.
>
>Olesya Turkina
>
Is the relationship between the "word" (something that seems obvious and
ordinary in the outer world; a word, yes a simple word, what's the big
deal?, but considered in terms of brain function, a result of
extrordinarily complex processing and mapping) and all of the things to be
named essentially a dialectical one ? Words (and word absences, in the
sense of taboo words which are transgressive. i.e., one has difficulty
imagining someone in their right mind standing up and screaming FUCK!!! in
the middle of a church service, but the same language is almost expected
when trying to rebuild a deisel engine and realizing that a critical part
has been mislaid) are constantly adapting to changes of circumstance,
alterations of culture and technology, and those same words establish
categories, ways of perception, implicit definitions, distinctions both
subtle and coarse ( for hair-splitters, take the distinction between
"celerity" and "alacrity" )... the word as invocation, well, invokes a way
of seeing things, but word as audience responds to things, a yin and a yang
function.