Reading The Loop by Jacques Roubaud, part 5
Map 1: §5 —> I§64 —> §5 —> §6 —> I§65 —> §6
Map 2: 27, 28, 221, 222, 223, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 223, 224, 225, 33, 34
"The passageways of memory have a strange reversibility (at the very heart of their general lack of direction)" (27).
"If one envisions the entire cycle of any act or event in a system where linear continuity and dialectical polarity no longer exist, in a field unhinged by simulation, all determination evaporates, every act is terminated at the end of the cycle having benefited everyone and having been scattered in all directions" (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation).
"certain awe-inspiring exploits in the world of knitting" (28).
One hen Two ducks Three squawking geese Four Limerick oysters Five corpulent porpoises Six pairs of Don Alverzo's tweezers Seven thousand Macedonians in full battle array Eight brass monkeys from the ancient, sacred crypts of Egypt Nine apathetic, sympathetic, diabetic old men on roller skates with a marked propensity towards procrastination and sloth Ten lyrical, spherical, diabolical denizens of the deep who haul stall around the corner of the quo of the quay of the quivery, all at the same time. (Thanks to Richard, Brent, and Ryan (many years ago))
"in those zones of petty twilight commerce in which craftiness feeds off credulity" (221).
"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 silenc's surface end up fluent), requires one to create a 'classification of the constituents of 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" (Dan Beachy-Quick, A Whaler's Dictionary).
"a lived moment takes its sense and direction only from what it anticipates" (29).
This space has been, during the writing and editing of this post, variously occupied by something I wrote in my creative writing class tonight about a mother lighting her whiny daughter's hair on fire, a youtube video of Steve Reich's minimalist composition "Six Pianos," and a couple of my own, highly uninteresting memories (playing gin rummy and watching Lawrence Welk with my grandmother; eating cereal before bed).
"Every image of the past is therefore a double image, revealed by the movement that pulls it along, a movement that is only arbitrarily forced to stand still when such an image is put into words. The only possible (partial) reconstitution of an image consists then in displacing the vision successively in both directions. Besides, the progression never follows a line, as in the ordinary reading of a book: it is at once densely ramifying and discontinuous, leading one to believe, inwardly, in the existence of atoms of time, indivisible and unmeasurable, since each displacement ceaselessly presents to me the divergent possibilities of what comes after" (30).
"The pages of a book are those sheets between which two minds enter one another to think the same thoughts. But every margin is Lethe, and to cross it is to begin to forget" (Dan Beachy-Quick, A Whaler's Dictionary).