so much to say about this post but first to brush sawdust, celluloid and
window details aside to respond to previous matters... (i confess to suffer
delightfully from slowness...)
>But I am having trouble making the jump to 'figure/figure/figure' and what
>>follows. I can't seem to grasp this. Can you help clarify?
i'll try:
i'm thinking about the durational conditions of pacing through the divided
lens of attention/distraction... "When you get to your feet to pace back
and forth in a room it is in order to in/habit a thought-formation." Here
the bodily act of pacing is situated as a 'ground' supporting a highly
focused mental state, one of extreme attention. The regularity and
consistancy of the footsteps provides for their invisibilty to thought.
They do not distract from what's at hand... rather, they serve - through
their banality - to distance onself from potential distractions that might
be hovering about, beckoning. i'm saying that the inhabitation of a
thought-formation 'figures' on this 'ground'.
yet when pacing is understood in the second sense described "between
squirts of windex, she watches TV" (why can't i leave this image?), i think
a different dynamic is set in motion where the question of which activity
grounds the other remains open... (windex requires attention in my home
these days)
without a ground, attention figures as distraction... we forget what we
were focusing on because something else has grabbed our attention... but it
is not a complete forgetting... somehow threads of what was just being done
linger, partially; fermenting; able to re-emerge fully at any instant given
the right signal. we carry with us that which we have forgotton. these
resonances, like ripples, continually re-figure that which transpires
across the crest of their wake...
from Borges via Foucault, a list:
this passage quotes 'a certain Chinese encyclopedia' in which it was
written that animals are divided into:
(a) belonging to the emporer
(b) embalmed
(c) tame
(d) sucking pigs
(e) sirens
(f) fabulous
(g) stray dogs
(h) included in the present classification
(i) frenzied
(j) innumerable
(k) drawn with a very fine camel hair brush
(l) et cetera
(m) having just broken the water pitcher
(n) that from a long way off look like flies
more asap
and
,
and/
department of public works