The Argonauts

p. 3

Before we met, I had spend a lifetime devoted to Wittegenstein’s idea that the inexpressible is contained—inexpressibly!—in the expresssed. This idea gets less air time than his more reverential Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent, but it is, I think, the deeper idea. It’s paradox is, quite literally, why I write, or how I feel able to keep writing.

p. 5

Just as the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase “I love you.” its meaning must be renewed by each use, as “the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.”

p. 9

… the romance of letting an individual experience of desire take precedence over a categorical one.

p. 14

But any fixed claim on realness, especially when it is tied to an identity, also has a finger in psychosis. If a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so (Lacan).

Perhaps this is why psychologist D. W. Winnicott’s notion of “feeling real” is so moving to me. One can aspire to feel real, one can help others to feel real, and one can oneself feel real—a feeling Winnicott describes as the collected, primary sensation of aliveness, “the aliveness of the body tissues and working of body-functions, including the heart’s action and breathing,” which makes spontaneous gesture possible. For Winnicott, feeling real is not reactive to external stimuli, nor is it an identity. It is a sensation—a sensation that spreads. Among other things, it makes one want to live.

p. 18-19

Sometimes one has to know something many times over. Sometimes one forgets, and then remembers. And then forgets, and then remembers. And then forgets again.

As with knowledge, so too, with presence.

p. 27

In fact I have come to understand revolutionary language as a sort of fetish—in which case, one response to the above might be, Our diagnosis is similar, but our perversities are not compatible.

[…]

[…] You’re the only one who knows when you’re using things to protect yourself and keep your ego together and when you’re opening and letting things fall apart, letting the world come as it is—working with it rather than struggling against it. You’re the only one who knows (Pema Chödrön). And the thing is, even you don’t always know.

p. 49

Many years ago, [Anne] Carson gave a lecture at Teachers & Writers in New York City, at which she introduced (to me) the concept of leaving a space empty so that God could rush in.

p. 98

Afraid of assertion. Always trying to get out of “totalizing” language, i.e., language that rides roughshod over specificity; realizing this is another form of paranoia. Barthes found the exit to this merry-go-round by reminding himself that “it is language which is assertive, not he.” It is absurd, Barthes says, to try to flee from language’s assertive nature by “add[ing[ to each sentence some little phrase of uncertainty, as if anything that came out of language could make language tremble.”