(Con)text

Two years. For two years I have let this blog reside in ambiguous tension. Will I return? Will I start a new blog? How does time pass in the domain of the internet? Perhaps the last question is more for my own curiosity than germane to the particular wrong I have done to this offspring of my intellect. I reread the introduction and I find it somewhat charming how I attempt to sound witty and hip. What was the context of the creation of this blog? Why did I even make it if I would abandon it after just one post? I suppose I did warn my future self that I am lackadaisical to such endeavors. Maybe even life itself. I did want to be an author. I still think I do, though my heart seems to stumble in the dark about the concept. What exactly is my ambition about this whole blog, which, I could expand to encompass what ambitions do I have for life itself. What is my motivation for writing? For Montaigne, it was to capture the babbling brook of the self, a fisher of words if you will, attempting to hoist what occurs inside of us out of the water with his words. For Virginia Wolfe, it was to capture the crippling ennui of domestic life. I think I really do enjoy Emily Dickinson’s own little proclamation for her reason writing:

To Make a prairie

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,

One clover, and a bee.

And revery.

The revery alone will do,

If bees are few.

This little jewel of a poem, and Dickinson has an armada of such poems, denotes the reason for her writing. How the mind can create that same prairie “if the bees are few.” Now, this is not some championing for an escape from reality. Despite Dickinson’s reclusive behavior, she would communicate with others, and it appears her reclusiveness could be sensationalized anyway. Because what this poem observes is the exact opposite of escape. There can be no escape from reality, since the revery has the prairie. In fact, one can actually perhaps go too far and encapsulate the prairie for all entirety as it is in the confines of our minds. In our mind, we can control everything, a tease of divinity that cannot correspond into the physical world. From this point of view, it may seem like it is reality that is running from us. After all, what is context but trying to understand the slippery form of reality? For example, let us put our beloved poet in context. Born in 1830, Dickinson would have seen the rise of transcendentalism as a prominent mode of thought in America, especially in the Northeast where she resided. They sought to make the abstract tangible, hence Dickinson’s style. It reflects the subject matter she grappled with such as love and death. As I read the brief biography of her life on the Poetry website, I am amazed how many other people are necessary in figuring out her life.

Her leaving the institution of Mount Holyoke is filled with speculation the biography states. Her residency ended with the passing of just one year, and the act of leaving itself has significance but the act alone cannot tell us why it is significant. Therefore, one must investigate what she told other people through her correspondence with them. However, this path does not find itself free of potential stumbling blocks either, for the letters seem to offer different reasons. Which one is the right one? Why not all of them? Why not none of them? I am often reminded of that little joke passed around by authors about their literary critic companions. “What if the blue curtains,” they propose, “are just blue curtains?” This of course depends on one understanding that blue is often associated with sorrow, so any literary critic worth his salt would scribble marginalia indicating the person owning those blue curtains must themselves be of a sorrowful disposition. Of course, both sides forget to celebrate the fact that there are curtains and that there is a color blue. Both have forgotten context, because there can be a world where Dickinson did not leave Mount Holyoke just like there can be a world where both blue and curtains do not exist. Context is filled with has many ghosts as it is clues. And I believe Miss Dickinson would be appalled at our limited imaginations if we could not find nothing but a symbol in those curtains. For her, words are a power, no different the arcane mutterings of witches in a fairy tale. They stake our claim on reality. They keep us from fading away. We can bring the prairie to us. We can bring worlds that never existed to us. 

Now, we may think to ourselves that context is surely difficult in the past because we live in the present. It takes some investigating in dusty libraries and long empty houses and cities to figure out what the context even was back then. In the present, we should have firm grasp of what is going on. In other words, we should understand context because we are living it. Notwithstanding this fact, we no more have a firmer grasp on context in our present condition than that famous photo of the elusive Sasquatch. In truth, that photo alone is the height of the anxiety of context. How do we know if it is true? How do we know that it isn’t just someone wearing a costume? But if it is true, what does the existence of such a creature really mean? That famous photo perfectly captures our postmodern insecurities. I remember watching a special on either the Discovery or History Channel (I enjoy Gravity Falls little stab at the history channel, calling it the Used To Be About History Channel) where a collection of experts are gathered in this sort of underground base area and discussing the viability of the Sasquatch. Now, the little group of experts enjoyed some laughs at the expense of those that think the Sasquatch a mythical animal like a unicorn. Yet, when proposed that the Sasquatch could be evidence of the missing link, all the experts suddenly turn quite serious, recounting anecdotes that support their hypothesis. It seems they have forgotten Mr. Schrödinger’s cat. When placed inside the box, the cat is both alive and dead until it can be observed. Therefore, the Sasquatch can be both mythical and natural in the same instance. I am curious how context and ontology, as espoused by Mr. Graham Harman, relate to each other, but that is for another blog.

I suppose what I am attempting to say in rather circuitous manner is that context is not just an ambiguous thing that can be pulled anyway we want it to go. Rather, context is a retreat. Realities retreat from us. Derrida once stated quite famously, “there is nothing outside the text.” Some say it should be more accurately translated “no outside-text,” but that does not concern us. Despite Derrida’s original intentions for this famous quote and his subsequent school of deconstruction, it has erased context altogether from modern life. I remember essays by René Girard where he recounts teaching in a university in the United States. In this particular class, Derrida’s deconstruction arose and Girard attempts to challenges a student’s particular interpretation of Derrida’s ideas. However, a curious moment occurs. The student interrupts Girard and simply states that Derrida himself is deconstructed, allowing for a new generation of deconstruction to begin. Indeed, I do not think Derrida quite envisioned such a radical strain of his thought to become popular, and Derrida at his best concerns himself with the how the texts hides and retreats from the glance. Yet, there is no more text now, because deconstruction now seeks a strange liberation from reality. During my time at UF, I encountered many students that repeated the same mantra: Reality is perception. Reality doesn’t exist. It is what me make it. Let us pause and examine the word context. Breaking it down, we understand con as a prefix that means with, where we understand a text in the more philological sense. A text is something that needs interpretation. Context is a perfect philological word. Text with something. The word itself imposes something be outside itself. Derrida says reality is hard to grasp because we cannot escape the text. We lack access to context. This thought has roots in psychoanalytic thought especially Lacan. It seems Derrida did not read Dickinson’s poem. Everything is outside the text. It awaits like Virgil to show you the world in a different light than you saw it before. Sometimes it will take you to hell. Sometimes too heaven. Texts devour. Reality does exist, I think even Derrida does not dispute this, however, we lost our poetry. We do not feel the tragedy. That we do not know how to access it. It happens in sudden moments. It may happen during a sunrise or sunset. It may happen when we have an epiphany. Or we will be like Beckett’s characters and await reality to come to us? Shall we lock ourselves away from reality inside our, as David Foster Wallace said, “skull-seized kingdoms.” 

What did I even say? Was it even me talking anymore? I am not done talking about this or anything, says the voices inside me. I do not say head because ghosts are not that dreary. Why do I resume this blog? Why do I cast my web into the empty space of the internet? I cannot say. Because I am trying to find a way to speak? Trying to find a way to communicate? I still feel I have the mouth of a babe, struggling to form the sounds into words. Still full of raw primal energies yet to be harnessed. I want to talk about everything. But how? This blog will be the struggles of simply try to speak about things. I will fail. I have always failed, but I just hope to fail better. What is my (con)text? What is trying to create me? Am I creating myself? Questions. I want to be a novelist because it is cool. Do I really want to write novels? Or do I look around and see how the novelist is celebrated as the king of writing? Perhaps I think that novels will give me the most fame and glory. What about my poems? It is my first love, and first loves rarely disappear from the soul. But poetry does not bring in money. My view of writing is prejudice. I have lost the love. Writing has become a means of erasing myself. Of making sure that I remain separate from reality. Who is saying this? I am not as intelligent as all the other people. Not as well read. Not as quick witted. Writing is about delving. Not oneself. But all the strange fragments the world leaves inside us. Pain that is not ours. Sadness that does not belong to us. “All of creation of moans,” wrote St. Paul, and poets listens to it. It gets inside the poet’s skin. We feel this moan, and capture the moments of hope that suddenly manifest. After all, a moan is a broken song, where the words cannot quite express the feeling. We try to find the words. We try to give the song words. “Poetry is what is lost in translation.” —Robert Frost 

Return to Sender

Cloud struggling to decide if its alpaca 

Or giraffe today. Lover notes how scars

Look like plowed soil, but you have yet

To revel in a grove of peaches.

Some days I await the dead to punch

Through the ground waving scripts 

In their nude phalanges informing

Us that this is not how Act 2000

Is supposed to go, but we kindly retort

That we got pretty darn good at improv

And don’t understand half the words anyway.

I would be lying if I said it is not tempting

Let the fizz from my Coca-cola to write the next

Line. Frog hunches in the shoe.

Lips reaching for the water.

Is it sad to think the water is trying

To kiss you back? Feeling what’s

It like to be in your skin? What is more tiring

Proteus? Shapeless or taking any shape,

Though in retrospect what’s the difference?

Waiting for your departed brethren 

To be reborn in the sky, 

And fall back to earth,

Hoping they fall back into you.