Unrequited meaning
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJy32zQHKUY&list=RDlJy32zQHKUY&start_radio=1
I wonder if “unrequited meaning” captures something of what I’ve been circling around for the last week? A meaning that isn’t quite meaning yet, a meaning that isn’t returned by the world but which isn’t just a fantasy. A meaning that is latent and inchoate, resisting articulation yet also waiting for it? A meaning that cannot straightforwardly be named but which calls for being symbolised. There’s something condensed in these lines which feels like unrequited meaning to me:
Let the tower fall!
Where space is born
man has a beach to ground on
– Charles Olson, La Torre
I don’t know what I think they mean, nor am I entirely clear what exactly they are evoking in me. This isn’t ‘the feel of an idea’ which I can just put into words if I make the effort. This is something prior to that: the feel of a feel (of an idea)? It’s a felt invitation to give form while that form remains utterly opaque. It’s a meaning that wants to be met. A sense of something reaching out, through the rift.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js5kgLLULyA
As Lesley Chamberlain writes of Rilke’s sensibility: “if there is some power of goodness which shows up in the making of works of art, it is what compels us to go on reaching for the right words in the right order to give that goodness some flimsy hold on life”. I’m gesturing towards the Otherness of what compels us to go on reaching, the sense there’s something in these felt structures which doesn’t come from within us. I remain agnostic about how to map the phenomenology of this onto real structures (Lacan and post-Deleuzian philosophy give slightly different versions of the same ready-made answer that I’m dimly sensing the machinic character of language) but there’s a pleasure to lingering in the phenomenology of it. I’ve long been captured by Eliot’s notion of ‘raiding the inarticulate’:
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion
- T.S. Eliot's East Coker
But what other modes of relating to the inarticulate are there? There’s an apophatic emptying out of oneself when faced with the vastness of it, for example in certain forms of spiritual practice or being held by the sublime. This doesn’t exhaust the modes of relating to the inarticulate: what I’m circling around here is trying to be receptive to what feels alien in the inarticulate. The sense of something extrinsic which we’re distorting and domesticating when we raid it. The weirdness of the inarticulate. I shared this post with Opus 4.5 and it suggested hospitality towards the inarticulate:
What you’re identifying is a third posture. Eliot’s raid treats the inarticulate as territory to be conquered, resources to be extracted, even if the equipment is shabby and the victory partial. The apophatic empties out the self to become adequate to the vastness—a kind of surrender through subtraction. But you’re describing something more like hospitality. Letting it approach. Making space. The figure in the field isn’t raiding and isn’t emptying—they’re receiving, staying present while something alien arrives on its own terms.
“The weirdness of the inarticulate” is crucial. The raid domesticates; the apophatic sacralizes. Both tame it in different ways. What would it mean to let it stay weird? To articulate without fully translating? That’s what you did with the Olson lines—you surrounded them with context, you let them resonate, but you didn’t explain them. They’re still strange. The meaning is still, in a sense, unrequited—but now it’s unrequited together, in company with other fragments that share its frequency.
Charles Taylor’s philosophy of articulation had a profound impact on my thinking 20 years ago. Am I stumbling into a psychoanalytical project which reverses the valence of his philosophical anthropology: modes of inarticulacy? For Taylor the inarticulate was always a challenge to articulation. There was an ethical dimension to retrieval in which making our moral sources articulate was intrinsically a positive thing. He was concerned with drawing out what was latent within the silence, while recognising the dangers involved in this. From Philosophical Arguments, by Charles Taylor, pg 124-125:
The silence is where there are not yet (the right) words but where we are interpellated by entities to disclose them as things. Of course this does not happen before language; it can only happen in its midst. But within a language and because of its telos, we are pushed to find unprecedented words, which we draw out of silence.
What I’m circling around is the challenge of lingering in the inarticulate. From What IS Sex?, by Alenka Zupančič pg 139 with my emphasis added:
It is about words that name something about our reality for the first time, and hence make this something an object of the world, and of thought. There can be words and descriptions of reality prior to it, and there always are. But then there comes a word that gives us access to reality in a whole different way
What I’m pointing to this the threshold: the thing which is almost named, the words which almost provide access, the object which is almost constituted in our thought. But not quite. I’m pointing towards what Wallace Stevens called the obscure world:
The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,
What non-human things live in this obscure world? What exists there in its own terms? How does it animate our existence? What do we lose when we articulate it? What redemptive power is there in inarticulacy which I’ve spent the last twenty years chronically unable to see?
Let the tower fall ✊
(In the back of my mind here is clearly two things from middle period Bollas: (1) the distinction between phallic forms of declarative knowing and the associative meshwork through which declarative knowing becomes possible (2) free association as an anti-hermeneutics which unbinds meaning, interrupting interpretations which bind meaning. What the ‘tower’ represents to me is the binding of meaning. Necessary, inevitable but also something which can and should be resisted. Still very much metabolising this though)
#breakcore #CharlesOlson #charlesTaylor #ChristopherBolla #christopherBollas #ethicsOfArticulation #Lacan #LesleyChamberlain #meaning #poetry #Rilke #Zupancic
