Thursday, December 24, 2015

These Sufferings of Absurdity


These Sufferings of Absurdity
of Maxwell Clark





As my friend (mi amigo) Eduardo Alvarez says so well: “we pain, we paint”. Or, as Helene Cixous elsewhere—and apparently independently—also discovered already in the title of her essay: ‘Paintings’. Pain-t[h]ings. Things of pain. The pain of things. How pained are things! We pain, so also are our paintings. Things pain us, so also we paint them. To paint is to express the pain of things. To impress pain into things. To pain of things. To objectify pain. To make static things tremble with our restless sufferings. To suffer things of expression. To suffer our creation(s). Creation is the suffering of things. The suffering of what is. Creation is the suffering of what is. What is only suffers its creation. To create what is one must suffer it. To suffer what is creates it. Suffering creates what is. To suffer creation is also its own aesthetic sensibility. Art is created suffering. Suffering is the sense of art. Art is only suffered aesthetically. Art is suffered to exist. Creation is suffered. To suffer creation is the aesthetic sense. Sensation is suffered. Creation is the sense of suffering. Suffering is the creation of sense. The aesthetic of suffering is creation unto itself. Creation suffers its aesthetic sensibility. Creation is the sense of suffering. The senses suffer creation. The creation(s) of the senses is suffering. Creation is to suffer the senses. To suffer creation is to be sensuous. Sensuousness creates suffering. Suffering is creation’s sense. To suffer creates sense. This sense is suffered as creativity itself. The creative sense is suffering. The sensitive suffer to create. Their sensitivity creates their suffering. Their suffering creates their sensation(s). Their sense of creation is suffering. Their creative sense is suffered. The sense of suffering is creation. Creation suffers its senses. The sense in suffering is its creation(s). Sense is suffered in creativity. To create sense is to suffer for it. To sense creation is to suffer for it. To suffer for making sense. To suffer making sense. To suffer makes sense. Sense is made suffering. Suffering makes sense. To make sense is to suffer. To suffer (is) made sense.




Monday, December 7, 2015

An Inconsistent and Unknowing Go at Soliciting Certain Responses From You

 by and of Maxwell Clark







I am rather unfamiliar with academia. I much prefer learning for myself, if you will---and if you will also pardon perhaps the naïveté of this affirmation I have just put forward ("I much prefer learning for myself..."), or its appearance as such thus far as this has gone. This, indeed, seems the only way I ever learn, that is, when I do so for myself; rather than for, or under, the rule of any ruling academic authorities. It seems, at least, that I must be involved in my own learning somehow for it actually to be mine at all. If I am not the one doing the learning, then who? Who learns for me if I do not learn for myself? My academic authorities? Fortunately, I no longer am privileged to any of that kind of person anymore. For, if my academic authorities are the ones learning, for me, rather than I learning for me, for myself, than I may very well doubt I am learning at all under such authorities as these. Or, how does one learn if not by oneself? One learns from others, of course, in teaching, of course. Thus, the interposition of academic authorities in between myself and my own learning, and, so, also, their own learning apart from mine, as authorities and/or learners unto themselves, finds its justification, or justice, in being done for me (if only maybe sometimes, in the best of circumstances), if you will, or as teaching. Who would ever deny this? Yet who also can defend that the teachers, then (and to stumble upon a more felicitous term here than "academic authorities"), somehow, do not interrupt, but substitute their learning---which is actually also embodied in -- or as -- themselves (or corporeally, then)---substitute it for my learning, as I am corporeally embodied in actuality as myself? I am not my others, much less the Other---I am myself alone. Yet, still, they (others) teach me. I cannot yet doubt this, or do not yet doubt this, except in the most the over-reconstrictedly (excuse), or orthodoxly Cartesian way---which is more on the register of fancy herein than conviction---I only protest that somehow, maybe---or, make that assuredly?---in some way I will never persuasively, much less really, know, how this said substitution (and this key term far more to be read in terms of embodiment than with that of knowledge, if only just for me) of the teacher for their student, is even possible, or desirable? Is teaching even assuredly so---as it is so far said above (as sort of a vaguely so far defined as a "substitution of embodiments", academic or otherwise)? Further, but also as a sort of aside---as it continues what was just before closed-off between the immediately foregoing parentheses ending the sentence before this---if teaching is delineated, as it were, and as so far as it is herein, on the register of the bodies which perform it, and, if this said (or tentatively-posed?) corporeality of teaching is further taken as a salient paradigm (if only insofar as it is so, or otherwise, for you, my dear audiences)---and, if perhaps then also only more or less---if this is then accepted to "function" (although my conviction is already waning at this somewhat awry term) "through" (or mayhap, rathermore, or also: "within", or "about", "by", "as", or "whatever else have you..."---prepositionally, but this is an almost absurdly pleonastic twist of that word---or, that is, more plainly, with especial regard to my preposition-use at the literary space defined as that immediately preceding this foregoing open-parenthesis) aforesaid and therein minimally contextualized, or not very ramified, name of "substitution"? Is this, my conceptuality, good enough? Or, does it hold good? And, then again, how do I further proceed with this abrupt introduction, or seemingly sudden foregrounding, of the ethical---in one among its core, if you will, or most signature terms: "good"? how? except as aggrieved, or apologetically, as guilty of what I have so far dared to fling out so hastily as I have in this---whatever it is (that it is). You, my audiences, I ask your forgiveness---whether in each uniquely individual reading of yours it is ever granted, or no; I can do no more than that, to ask it of you---and thereafter go on, if still very much uneasily aggrieved (perhaps even moreso in, or for, the deferral, or, more likely post-mortem delay, or again, wait, I must suffer for this thing I have so foolishly as such written here; as it is, before you, and so too almost necessarily before you may ever grant me my/its desired atonement). To go on then, I return to my afore self-interrogated terminologies (in brusque: "embodiment" and "substitution") and their deployments here-above in this text... and, then, I wonder: how does one go on addressing that other issue which had arisen just before this once before said (as once also before that too?) self-interrogation of my own usages, which was, but of course, as it nascent-emerged, again, from those other, even more anterior, thematic schemas I see and/or recall seeing coalesce within/as this work? Is it good, again---to deploy again that already (for me) troublesome word---whatever my somewhat strong inclination to disavow its use herein already---yes, that word which is also a signal or marker suggesting (or is it imposing?) an ethical register for this document and your receptions of it---is it, again, then, good that this writing cannot seem but to "implode" back in upon itself the moment it affirms anything? Why even affirm anything then, or as such, if I am simply going to recant each of any of those affirmations at some place in their afterwards? In order simply to recant it? That is, affirm for the sake of recantation? What then is the attraction of such ritualistic recantation to me? To slip then back into my ominous habit of affirmation, then, is it not that I emulate Plato's Socrates when he affirms in the Apology (and elsewhere, I believe) that his only knowledge is that he knows nothing. And, then, does recantation---which is, or is it "not", the same as negation? (I, then, maybe foolishly, as too abrupt, and so as ever and again, tend to suggest it is otherwise than identical with negation as above brought into issue)---lie like a seed, if you will, within the body, if you will, of each and---only thus---every affirmation? And is this writing not becoming but an incessant tissue of unanswered inquiries? Is not that then how to write something while still knowing nothing? By having no answers? Is questioning (even) a form of knowledge, put otherwise, and if only perhaps? Or, isn't questioning a form of the absence of knowledge? as then also its soliciting, or the calling forth of knowledge itself then too? A knowledge to come, then, and which, in the meanwhile, is again---if to mince one's words very precisely, or over-precisely, mayhaps---absent from its discourse?

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

A Teaching From About Stein

of Maxwell Clark



"If you don't understand what I am talking about then I am talking about nothing and it makes no difference, if you do then there's enough said."

—Gertrude Stein, Q.E.D.



If these letters that I have made written here just for this place alone were only good for what they looked like to anyone else and only that alone, then what can they be really good for? Not even much for looking at is what. The prettiest and most delicately loveliest bird-music of speaking out a new opening life and it up from under its long hushing-up is what she had written down so perfectly well and it is still very good. The special person whose very musical voice was that of whose I just said it was and she was just starting to come out into the opened places of outer-life and outer-world peoples is what she was and was making her doing so good and unlike so many others. She was ever and ever and ever again getting herself out of her closed-in small past and past lives that locked closed inside the inner-rooms and shut-up houses. And ever was she out-going and out loud gone again into the opens and outer places. Her voice had its own set of past lives to it too and it was now more than ever much surrounded too by outside living people who could hear it more than ever before. The way she wrote then was with her same older voice from that of her hushed-in past and so her voice told her how to. It was louder now and again also too. But maybe only her same older past voices or voice was written down also because it is also that she had also gone outside to the talk of the unlocked places and elsewhere open spots and open peoples a lot more than some others who had still been locked-in into their shut-up hushed insides. And she had learned out there out among the many more outside people there that she could speak more loudly to them like as she once did hushed to herself too—but now also to them and among them in this way louder as well. Going outer more and ever more outside to the outside places so much was how she learned to write for them her inside hushed voice and but also to speak it out very loudly. So she somehow by a new miracle and coincidence of life got herself somewhat very much quickly out of the locked-up hushed-up insides of her past and went out to its open places enough to just belong there too. Then this outside wanted to hear more about her older locked-in inside and its hushed life that had almost perfectly no outside. So because she belonged enough to the outside then and so then she just wrote down then whatever of her talk was still left hushed inside of herself from the old insides and also the hushed inside of all of her old ancestral past lives and so on and so then also a little somewhat including also all of the old hidden talk hidden hushed-in inside every locked private room and quiet shut-up house. And this is just what I do really hear when it was there before me after she wrote it down for us.