Can word be both text and the image, graffiti over-top? We cannot deny the inself in three dimensions even if it
lives in four. The truest representation is the sculpted. A scientist
claims to the artist, "you made the leaf, but I discovered it," but the
sculptor replies, "you described it, plucked it, preserved
it in glue. It is a construct of your mind and mine," but neither
of them did. Neither have traveled to that far country from which when you
return you cannot speak and if you did no one would believe.
The Branch cries out to the image seen and the word spoken and the word longs to be seen. Fraktur text and image twine these together, Concrete poems, vispo pretend to do it on paper and type. Blake illustrates. We must know the leaf inself alive. The botanist who presses a leaf must know the leaf alive, but image and word are incompatible.
Twine a poem about a branch,
it will not leaf.
Tendrils do not speak.
The Inself speaks the plant.
What is the speech of corn?
What says aloe? Every thing has breath. Plants breathe light. THOSE WHO LOOK TO HIM ARE RADIANT. I will consider in my dwelling place like a clear heat upon herbs, a cloud of dew in the midst of harvest.
At Altamira many millennia of horses and bulls had no words, but rhythm and color. They had no language, nothing written the stones cry. Breuil says art was an extension of hunt, the worship of life, a celebration.
These matter when the content is
greater than itself. The words show something more than mundane. Why
else make the effort? Charles Williams designs the figure of a woman and stretches it
over the kingdom of Logres, over all of Europe (see the endpapers of Taliessin Through Logres,
Oxford, 1938), like the Cave at Altamira and its bison, except
Williams' Europe is Logres, Arthur's kingdom, and did not
exist as the bison in the real, or it did and now only remains expressed on the cave
wall, as the bison, Williams' Taliesin.
Inself sounds like Inscape. A true statement about Hopkins is that "seen from one point of view Hopkins' work is some dozen nearly perfect lyrics. Seen from another perspective it is a heterogeneous collection of documents...but within this seemingly chaotic mass we can detect a certain persistent structure." J. Hillis Miller. This describes life on the borders.
The Branch cries out to the image seen and the word spoken and the word longs to be seen. Fraktur text and image twine these together, Concrete poems, vispo pretend to do it on paper and type. Blake illustrates. We must know the leaf inself alive. The botanist who presses a leaf must know the leaf alive, but image and word are incompatible.
The Cover
So
the Inself concedes the Out as leaf, or in human terms, mask, a
covering of face for what exists but cannot be seen. It can't be seen because it
is thought which does not exist in language, but in image.
This is all Levinas before I knew him.
Walking one side of this border, up against it, cross immediately the other side.
The Speech of CornTwine a poem about a branch,
it will not leaf.
Tendrils do not speak.
The Inself speaks the plant.
What is the speech of corn?
What says aloe? Every thing has breath. Plants breathe light. THOSE WHO LOOK TO HIM ARE RADIANT. I will consider in my dwelling place like a clear heat upon herbs, a cloud of dew in the midst of harvest.
At Altamira many millennia of horses and bulls had no words, but rhythm and color. They had no language, nothing written the stones cry. Breuil says art was an extension of hunt, the worship of life, a celebration.
Inself sounds like Inscape. A true statement about Hopkins is that "seen from one point of view Hopkins' work is some dozen nearly perfect lyrics. Seen from another perspective it is a heterogeneous collection of documents...but within this seemingly chaotic mass we can detect a certain persistent structure." J. Hillis Miller. This describes life on the borders.
Take the border between image and word.
The verbal is the interior leaf,
images the internal sense,
the leaf inself of the seen,
the leaf inseen of the self.
