Monday, June 3, 2013

No Object #2

Please, look back at Kevin Cashen's video of my reading at Bookshop Santa Cruz (May 8, 2012) and my remark there about "incommensurability." It was posted here on May 22, 2012. It can also be reached directly on You Tube at this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y693tTrBGJg&feature=youtu.be

Then, look at the talk from the University of Washington @ Bothell's "Convergence" conference on poetics (Sept. '12), where the pictures play another role in "illustrativity." This video was also put together by Kevin Cashen (thank you). Its link is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Echx5aBCjg




No Object #1

     What you see is what you get. Examine that and it opens again and again, like a joke. It never says what you see is what is, although "the moons are as they are" (Dogen, again). What you get is what you will see, mountain/snow for instance. First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is a song by Donovan, then there is a great jam version by The Allman Brothers, and the Dead incorporated it too. You can only get what you've actually seen, and the way words become part of that is where money comes in. And as long as money's coming in, the music gets heard. And that's basically all you can get out of the Sixties' system unless the words bang into themselves while crowding towards their object, as in the "Mountains and Waters Sutra" of Dogen. This piece was collected in what the English-speaking world calls the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, but the French call it La Réserve visuelle des événements dans leur justesse. "There are mountains hidden in treasures," asserts the final section of this "visual reserve of events in their justice." As we try to see what we can get from this, it occurs to me that in such a dialectical "Hegelianism without reserves" (as Reb Derrida called it), incommensurability might just be just.