The universe is thought, not language. Thought has no language. Is there a language thought? The last paragraph of the interview "distinguishes an animal voice (a voice of sonic continuum) from a human voice (a voice of sonic articulation).... The animal voice, Hegel claims, is pure sound, empty and grounded in negativity... every animal finds its voice in its violent death; it expresses itself as a removed self.” How could Hegel ever have left his house to say this? Every animal finds its voice in praise of life. Sometimes the man speaks with animal voice, body voice, as with moans, cries, but the man is the one removed from the natural. Assuming to be proved that he is removed, "By intercepting this animal voice of death and subjecting it to articulation, human language, he [Hegel] says, emerges with two decisive characteristics: (1) it retains within it the voice of death; (2) it becomes the voice of consciousness thereby converting negativity into being - To me signals a fundamentally poetic quality in Hegel’s thinking, establishing as it does its mythogeme of “voice” on the codification of vowel and consonant as respectively animal and human." (McCaffery 46). Too many vowels, drugs, disease, or disaffections? There is no language of protons.
Voice
There is a lot said of the two voices of In and Out, the simplest being that language cannot simultaneously express wave and particle motion. If the wave is both so is thought. Poets want to hallow "a new language," asserted of Beissel's mysticism (by Bach) as much as of Boehme. Poets want to speak revelations like prophets. Steve McCaffery and Karen Mac Cormack (end of the interview) want their voices to be an "idea, already implicit in Aristotle’s description of the two voices (articulate and inarticulate) [which] obtains almost a pataphysical excellence!" Pataphysical means imaginary, an imaginary solution to an imaginary problem. Language and thought are one of these. On the same page Mac Cormack gets pataphysical, says "Voice is a tangled mythogeme," and "poetry’s primal scene as that of inspiration involves at its base a fundamental “other” voice, a voice speaking through one. This image of the poet as a passive, possessed mouthpiece of an alien voice runs from Plato’s Ion through to Jack Spicer’s poetics of dictation." BUT IT IS NOT SPEAKING THROUGH, IT IS SPEAKING WITH.
These writers mean by alien any heterology requiring a breaking apart, part and parcel of the new world of strangelets meant to make Earth into a neutron star. No, Bataille, Heidegger, Derrida and Nietzsche do not reveal their plans in this. Per-yaps (sic) they do not know, if they can be allowed this ignorance, since philosophy with science has been and is so directed by the alien heterology itself that posits a world where only the inorganic will hold sway, if inorganic means spirit. I don't know it it does. By this light the breaking of dimensions underway at CERN will induce the greatest modern act of deconstruction, the end of the world. No less that Hawking believes a vacuum to suck. Any consideration of these ideas must therefore be lardered with neologism, solecisms, and outright mockeries of these notions, even while acknowledging that what went before was mere preparation for this grand synthesis. Don't you want a whole not-earth? The Hegelian model still prevails until it is consumed. This of course all assumes, and won't mind saying so, that Messiah will not dash them to pieces, even as they know He will, but it won't change them after they have absorbed the beast into themselves. "Let favor be shown to the wicked yet will he not learn...when Thy hand is lifted they will not see" (Isaiah 26. 10-11). Then it will be true that that the beast will cry out with the language of negativity. At this moment however all the beasts are full of praise.
Speaking this way is not novel to those who do. Calling the other alien however is more theater than belief. It's not alien if it is endemic and indigenous, meaning from within the speaker's life. Indigenous means also of community and ethos, Hopi or Pennsylvania Dutch. Whatever Walt Whitman says comes from his own peculiarly driven mind even if is spoken with the voice of the Upanishads. A new language does not imply new ideas or facts, but some writers, Barthes, Agamben, see the alien voice as the voice of death, "the originary place of negativity" and that "...language is a negativity, the unsayable and the ungraspable" (Agamben) and cannot but be negativity unless it never existed. The thought goes then that "only if language no longer refers to any voice...is it possible for man to experience a language that is not marked by negativity and death" (Dillon, Politics of Security, 115). But the voiceless verb, the silence of unknowing that passes as world class originality is suicidal, because thought is Simultaneous Memory, Reality, Fantasy, Being.
These writers mean by alien any heterology requiring a breaking apart, part and parcel of the new world of strangelets meant to make Earth into a neutron star. No, Bataille, Heidegger, Derrida and Nietzsche do not reveal their plans in this. Per-yaps (sic) they do not know, if they can be allowed this ignorance, since philosophy with science has been and is so directed by the alien heterology itself that posits a world where only the inorganic will hold sway, if inorganic means spirit. I don't know it it does. By this light the breaking of dimensions underway at CERN will induce the greatest modern act of deconstruction, the end of the world. No less that Hawking believes a vacuum to suck. Any consideration of these ideas must therefore be lardered with neologism, solecisms, and outright mockeries of these notions, even while acknowledging that what went before was mere preparation for this grand synthesis. Don't you want a whole not-earth? The Hegelian model still prevails until it is consumed. This of course all assumes, and won't mind saying so, that Messiah will not dash them to pieces, even as they know He will, but it won't change them after they have absorbed the beast into themselves. "Let favor be shown to the wicked yet will he not learn...when Thy hand is lifted they will not see" (Isaiah 26. 10-11). Then it will be true that that the beast will cry out with the language of negativity. At this moment however all the beasts are full of praise.
Speaking this way is not novel to those who do. Calling the other alien however is more theater than belief. It's not alien if it is endemic and indigenous, meaning from within the speaker's life. Indigenous means also of community and ethos, Hopi or Pennsylvania Dutch. Whatever Walt Whitman says comes from his own peculiarly driven mind even if is spoken with the voice of the Upanishads. A new language does not imply new ideas or facts, but some writers, Barthes, Agamben, see the alien voice as the voice of death, "the originary place of negativity" and that "...language is a negativity, the unsayable and the ungraspable" (Agamben) and cannot but be negativity unless it never existed. The thought goes then that "only if language no longer refers to any voice...is it possible for man to experience a language that is not marked by negativity and death" (Dillon, Politics of Security, 115). But the voiceless verb, the silence of unknowing that passes as world class originality is suicidal, because thought is Simultaneous Memory, Reality, Fantasy, Being.
Being, not being, language, thought, the death of the author (Barthes) in all this is simple speech. To speak as a bear, fly like a bird, leap like a cat is voice as action. These philosophers could write a bestiary of themselves. A bestiary of vowels comes down neither to voice or language but to breath. Everything that has breath. Comic cosmic bestiaries produced by linguists and philosophers slander the animal to justify human malaise. However the poet is passive in speaking, it is not in speaking the voice of death, but transfiguring life.
The Medium of Thought
What are the languages of the in and out? There is no language of In.
To call thought "language" is a metaphor used only because there is no
language of thought. Thought is cast into language by speech, translated
by voice when speech occurs. This translation is magnanimous. It
assumes the end of the beginning. I speak therefore I think. Thought is not languaged.
Its exploration must occur between people after it is translated to
language when the presumption occurs that it is language. It is a
glaring assumption that I speak what I think. The medium of thought is
the image.
What good is work if the life cannot live? Poets fail in their public and private thoughts. We say life is a work. We say public achievement, action imitated and celebrated, may burn. We say the nature of a poet's death is important as his birth. Then we know what we control. Death is not desired, not suicide or any of diseases, strokes, sicknesses. What is left at the end of a year depends on what theme we follow. All themes merge in each other in memory and thought. Who died young, who of sickness, who of addiction, who was alienated, lost love, found ignominy, prison? The mishaps of necessity gain sympathy.
Suffering makes the soul, binding the book, mistake and limitation art. Suffering is sympathetic when it appears Necessary. Put under stress, see what comes out. Art comes when the farmer's skin cracks. Surgeons do not suffer such defects, but all suffer choices. One is doctor, another, a farmer is luck, maybe destined. Desperations escape, things turn on their head. Enough food in some places causes obesity. Too little is too much, the atmosphere, autism is up. If only were the throat of the world unloosed. It is of poets this illumination comes. To find a context for our lives we judge theirs.
Imagine words themselves, spoken the last moment before waking as a cue, to figure out what?
Navajo matriarchy? The imagination of kinship. The phrase occurs in Karl Magnuson's, The World from Within, in an article "The Utopian Imagination of Aboriginalism," in "Virtual Kinship, Real Estate, and Diaspora Formation" and most importantly in the Poetics of the Feminine and that's it.
There is increasing consciousness that kinship lasts materially beyond death. It is said that you know your parents after their deaths and if parents then entire genomes. Is this another case where the thing exists in a way not known before, as is said of consciousness or is it revisting the guest-host codes, reverence of ancestors in patriarchy?Does it take the inquiry into less aware notions of mythogeme, of notions of Bataille's death of myth which is really birth of anti-myth, new myth? The good news is some interesting writers are attracted here, Steve McCaffery's, Prior to meaning: the protosemantic and poetics , who applies Prigogine's physics to poetry, just what Prigogine wanted to do.
This piece was subtitled the alien voice, but it is not. Likewise in Human Botany there is a piece called Alien Knowing and Unknowing, but it too is not and neither is the Space Counterfeit Messiah alien of A Poetical Reading. The dramatic, romantic modern needs new language or old and more honest found to talk of the human.
“What is your aim in Philosophy?”
“To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle” (Philosophical Investigations) – Wittgenstein
"Wittgenstein thought that the pursuit of philosophy in its traditional sense is pointless. Philosophers who scoured far and wide for a structured logical form applicable to everything were deluded and wasting their time, much like a fly who constantly tries to escape a transparent bottle by banging against the side. Wittgenstein saw it as his job to show these tenacious philosophers out of the top of the fly-bottle and to see philosophy for what it really is – a futile attempt to find an all-encompassing logical form of thought behind the mess that is ordinary language…."
There are two languages one of words, one of images, except that in a third the words hide illusions of words in the first, and in the forth the images are symbols of something else entirely.
Words are an image of every thought,
sound, taste and color felt.
sound, taste and color felt.
That swim in an ocean that resembles itself,
drawn up in air to eye and ear
to evaporate and fall from sky.
Seen as drops what were none at all,
gathered in buckets, these drops make words.
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