Reading The Loop by Jacques Roubaud, part 3
**Map 1: §3 —> I§58 —> §3 —> I§59 —> §3
Map 2: 19, 20, 21, 22, 212, 213, 22, 214, 215, 22, 23**
The Loop begins with an image of a finger scraping frost off the inside of a window, an image which Roubaud is (now X pages into the book) analyzing thoroughly, gorgeously, lovingly.
Upon reading the initial description of the image/memory, I was reminded of my dad telling me about growing up in a house in the country, a house without electricity, and of sleeping in an unheated upstairs room. "In the winter, if you took a glass of water upstairs to bed with you," he said, "when you woke up, there'd be a skin of ice on top. My bed must have had four or five blankets on it."
I doubt my dad said "skin of ice." That sounds like something I would say. In fact, I almost wrote "lid of ice," but that seemed even less appropriate (not least because of the implication that the ice would somehow have been covering the mouth of the glass, which would only have been possible if the glass had been nearly overfull, the meniscus bulging up over the rim).
Much of §3 (and its interpolations (which belong ("belong"?) to §3?) has to do with how the initial image (there's more to it, by the way, than my too brief description) is connected to a line of poetry by Raimbaut d'Orange: "Er resplan la flor enversa" (Then shines the inverse flower).
Roubaud connects this "inverse flower" both to frost and to "The Way of Double Negation," which he then connects to definition or the act of defining. There proceeds from this a lot of language which doubles back on itself (1. "'Do you not see, then, that the definition that defines all things is "not other" than what it defines?'", and 2.
For if we return to the dialogue's point of departure, we see that the "Not-Other," the "Not-Not"—in other words, God (a "not-not God")—is defined as that which defines, by essence and par excellence. But the movement of every (Cusan) definition of a thing, d, is to place itself within that which is not defined as d and then to step back out of it by a second movement of negation: d is not this, which is not d. But, if it's a matter of an actual, given thing, one can never reach d in this way, at least in the intuitionist space of proofs by definition. One arrives at almost-d, at quasi-d perhaps, but not at d itself. Except, that is, in the unique case in which d is definition itself, D. D, Deus, or God is the proof itself of everything, absent from every definition, from every proof: the inverse flower.
) which, though perhaps difficult to keep track of, only makes sense if one is talking about how the act of defining works, and, of course, also mirrors the form of the book (again: perhaps difficult to keep track of), and which is also nicely articulated by Dan Beachy-Quick in his book about Moby-Dick, A Whaler's Dictionary:
The awful trick of definition requires the impossible work of erasing the terms by which one speaks of the world in order to experience the world directly, and so to define anew, and speak of it again. To do so, if anyone can do so (will oneself to aphasia and by some Möbius turn on silence's surface end up fluent), requires one to create a "classification of the constituents of a chaos." Chaos here is both silence and frenzy—the possibility to speak in parallel of the whale's possibility to give light, the process before the worded illumination.
Frost and spermaceti, by the way, are both white.
I'm likely mis-explaining Roubaud (but good lord, I'm reading this book in an English translation, I could easily be mis-explaining a mis-explanation!), if I am explaining Roubaud at all. Maybe I'm complicating Roubaud.
But and it all comes back to this: that I use that tiny tidbit of personal history to define my dad's childhood: a house without electricity (did they perhaps use whale oil to light their rooms? (no, they probably used kerosine (a cup of which, strangely, my dad accidentally (is there any other way?) drank as a child which event possibly, for him, defines his childhood (being rushed up out of the canyon to the doctor, almost dying! (meaning that he almost wasn't my father (here we are, deep in the parenthetical land of double negation)))))) in the very middle of the 20th century, which has always seemed really late to me (to not have electricity) but which, to me, really does (begin to) define my dad in some twisty, Möbius way.