Under the Sign

Read Under the Sign for Free Online Page A

Book: Read Under the Sign for Free Online
Authors: Ann Lauterbach
Tags: General, American, Poetry
and shall be insignificant. Avert it, heaven! avert it, virtue! I need excitement.
    Wind sound: as if the dark were in motion, an inky processional bloom.
    Is there any way to measure or articulate the difference between writing or reading on or from a page and writing or reading a screen? What is the nature of this difference; does it matter? The question will soon be moot. Ah, books, the handwriting is on the wall.
    37.
    Milky morning light. Squirrel headed up the maple with a mouthful of leaves. Nesting. River gentian blue. Squirrel back down for more leaves. Deep hole in the tree.
    The word estranged hangs in the air; remnant bit of conversation. The eyes stay a few seconds longer than they ought, or might. The twilight god is up to no good. The core spot is activated as a form of transport; the chip that harbors all the reticent energy awaiting release. Phantasm arc, zipper across the world; open it. Let mind embrace matter, let language subside into shared assent.
    David Graeber ( Possibilities ):
    In the world posited by Medieval psychology, desires really could be satisfied for the very reason that they were really directed at phantasms: imagination
    was the zone in which subject and object, lover and beloved, really could genuinely meet and partake of one another.
    38.
    Old question: is there such a thing as disinterested love? Love without either the desire to possess or the expedience of use: ultimate good inscribed in religious texts and figured in the democratic civic ideal: to choose the many over the one. In our new world order, this choice seems difficult to access, remote, blocked by stunted ideologies, a staging of self-interest that stymies the possibility of responsive thought attached to deeds on behalf of , for, the greater good; so much myopic friction, belligerence, animosity. Pious rhetoric of shared interest, sacrifice.
    If I love a painting by, say, Philip Guston or Joe Brainard or Amy Sillman, is that love animated in part by a desire to own it? But then I want to say—with John Dewey—that an experience is a form of possession, something one has . I experience love for something or someone, and that love is what I possess; not the object of it. This is the side of Pragmatism often overshadowed by an emphasis on practicality and cool legal utility, outcomes or consequences uninformed by affects. The rational is pernicious if stripped of affect; reason includes it.
    The experience of art shows us how to attach feeling to critical thinking, and so might inform, temper, how we act toward each other.Without this experience, we are set adrift in received, rigid ideas of the good. Art marks, demonstrates, the passage from the good to the just through the agency of care. To make something is to care for it. The burden of care. Etymology finds grief , anxiety .
    The need to consider, to teach, human efforts and practices that do not immediately convert into practical utility or commerce.

    Can the Internet be said to give us an experience, in this sense of fully undergoing something? There’s something at stake here I cannot quite name, having to do with the relation of mental activities to material or physical presence: the embodied, the performed, the real or actual near. Anxiety that our sense of each other will be denuded of the spontaneous ensemble of minute readings—facial expressions, hand gestures, vocal inflection, smells—which until now have informed how we distinguish, for example, those we come to love or admire from those we fear or detest.
    This is almost too basic but touches on an elision, a potential devaluating, of our creaturely beings.
    Noema, when we doe signify some thing so privily that the hearers must be fayne to seeke out the meaning by long consideration.
    39.
    Surplus ubiquity of imposed critique and rampant opinion; nothing can be near under these forms of distantiation; embarrassed at the very site of our attachment to work: productivity, satisfaction,

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