Rebecca Solnit, on Woolf and Uncertainty

Rebecca Solnit is my favorite author for the audiobooks I listen to. Maybe she’s the one who got me into listening to audiobooks with her Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Her essay collection Men Explain Things to Me has seven essays, one focusing on Virginia Woolf in dialogue with Susan Sontag. She returns back to this topic in Hope in the Dark, too. Maybe I can add that here as well. For now, I’d like to quote a passage from this essay, Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable, to get back to it in the future.

Solnit, R. (2014). Men explain things to me. Haymarket Books.


Principles of Uncertainty

Woolf is calling for a more introspective version of the poet Walt Whitman’s “I contain multitudes,” a more diaphanous version of the poet Arthur Rimbaud’s “I is another.” She is calling for circumstances that do not compel the unity of identity that is a limitation or even repression. It’s often noted that she does this for her characters in her novels, less often that, in her essays, she exemplifies it in the investigative, critical voice that celebrates and expands, and demands it in her insistence on multiplicity, on irreducibility, and maybe on mystery, if mystery is the capacity of something to keep becoming, to go beyond, to be uncircumscribable, to contain more.

Woolf’s essays are often both manifestoes about and examples or investigations of this unconfined consciousness, this uncertainty principle. They are also models of a counter-criticism, for we often think the purpose of criticism is to nail things down. During my years as an art critic, I used to joke that museums love artists the way that taxidermists love deer, and something of that desire to secure, to stabilize, to render certain and definite the open-ended, nebulous, and adventurous work of artists is present in many who work in that confinement sometimes called the art world.

A similar kind of aggression against the slipperiness of the work and the ambiguities of the artist’s intent and meaning often exists in literary criticism and academic scholarship, a desire to make certain what is uncertain, to know what is unknowable, to turn the flight across the sky into the roast upon the plate, to classify and contain. What escapes categorization can escape detection altogether.

There is a kind of counter-criticism that seeks to expand the work of art, by connecting it, opening up its meanings, inviting in the possibilities. A great work of criticism can liberate a work of art, to be seen fully, to remain alive, to engage in a conversation that will not ever end but will instead keep feeding the imagination. Not against interpretation, but against confinement, against the killing of the spirit. Such criticism is itself great art.

This is a kind of criticism that does not pit the critic against the text, does not seek authority. It seeks instead to travel with the work and its ideas, to invite it to blossom and invite others into a conversation that might have previously seemed impenetrable, to draw out relationships that might have been unseen and open doors that might have been locked. This is a kind of criticism that respects the essential mystery of a work of art, which is in part its beauty and its pleasure, both of which are irreducible and subjective. The worst criticism seeks to have the last word and leave the rest of us in silence; the best opens up an exchange that need never end.

Ovid in the Third Reich, Geoffrey Hill (Quote) w/ Moddi

I love my work and my children. God
Is distant, difficult. Things happen.
Too near the ancient troughs of blood
Innocence is no earthly weapon.


The full version of the poem can be found in Poetry Foundation.

Source:
Geoffrey Hill, “Ovid in the Third Reich” from New and Collected Poems, 1952-1992. Copyright © 1994 by Geoffrey Hill. Used with the permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Source: New and Collected Poems 1952-1992 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994)


It reminded me of Moddi’s A Matter of Habit:

Oh, being human is a matter of habit
A few baby steps, then you get better at it
To be for one minute, just now, just recall
The opposite side of the towering walls
But our hearts have hardened along with our skin
We built a bubble and let no one else in

Hong Sang-soo | Tactile Not I

Yöntemi Tan Tolga Demirci’den çalıyorum, onun da Švankmajer’den esinlendiğini düşünüyorum. Blogunda en sevdiğim kısımdı Tactile Deneyler. Ben de kendime göre yaparım. Deneye deneye belki öğrenirim. Hong Sang-soo için tactile not.


gör: sonradan eklenmiş dijital gren efekti
kokla: içki dökülmüş masa örtüsü
dokun: tiftik yün atkı
duy: asfalt ve çiseleyen yağmur
tat: küflü zarf

boksi I

önümde sağ ayağı yanmış bir
üst kollarına che dövmesi yapmış, üç sivil
kapalı alanlarda mırıldanıyor mır mır
alerta alerta anti faşista
şok şok şok, duvar geçen güneş sokağında
şarkılarla yavaşça
almanca öğreniyoruz

haftalar geçmiş, yeni bir gün bu
vagabond gemisinde sessiz bir bahçedeyiz
greta’yla şarkılar dinliyoruz şimdi
zengin öldürüyoruz ama bir başlayamadık ki
burayı görmüş geçirmiş mutlu punk çiftler
bize bakıp o dövmeleriyle gülümsese
güneşin batışıyla tekrar kapalı alanlarda
ucuz ledlerle öylesine ışıklandırılmış
okuma lambasının etrafında buluşan mahalle sinekleriyle
bir gün yaklaşıp, sarılı veriyoruz

kenarından çizdiğimiz bir yolda çok yavaş adımlarla
sırtımızda kamp çantalarımız, çok yüksek bir bpm’de
x > 90, hesabı ödeyelim, gına yolda
bundan sonra çok demeyelim, abartma

they don’t know they are brainwashed
biliyorlar ama boş, yine yapıyorlar
sırtında büyük harflerle do you want to die (ah)
bir miktar beyaz pamuk üzerine kızıl kara verbatim
iki dakika yedi metre
uzaktan izledim
şairleri google’dan birkaç kelimeyle takipteyim
burada şiir kitabı yok ya
bookmark’larımda ‘ş’ klasörü hemen
arılar kovdular, hamam böcekleri de kovar
hırsızlar da kavgaya katılınca yerimden oldum
kendimi posta kutusunda buldum (yo)

elektronik sigara ikram ediyorsun, hem de bio
kundera’nın ölüşü ve ursula’nın daha önce
bunlara hetero pesimizmi de ekledik sonra
daha çok dövme, daha çok kayıtsız saçlar
succession’ın finali, cam kavanozun yuvarlanışı
emojiler
iki saat ses pornosu dinledikten sonra
sıcacık bir pazar gününde biz ne yapmalıyız
göl hariç
başkalarıyla, dostlarıyla çiçekli bir kahve fotoğrafı olup
inanmayarak tüm olan bitene
parklaşamamış bir meydandaki ağaca sorduk
n’aber diye

para kommt, angst yok
diz ağrılarını twitter’a nası’ yazıyorlar
from pakistan, with love, wa22ermann
benim de rakamlı bir adım olsun mu
ya da mavi ışıklar ve hidrasyonla
çilekli yoğurt yiyerek geçebilen sakin hayat