The Daily Dose

Today, I have a great urge to write The Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words, but my purpose for writing, beyond wanting to write something to sustain, sooth and/or shake my faithful readers- most of which are spambots, though a convincing case could be made that they do not really read The Daily Dose and thus should not be counted as part of my readership, and yes, I know, I have mentioned this fact before; I’ll just warn you now, I am known to be obsessional, so I will probably say it again and again- my purpose in writing is uncertain. Today, I find my way word by word, which makes it appear to be a linear process. While the linear does play a role in how the words are laid down, how they line up, how you read and evaluate them, writing, my writing, seldom is straightforward.

Today, I want to share with y’all just how much I love words and their all kissing cousins- sentences, paragraphs, essays, stories, plays, songs, poems, novels, novellas, scripts, dialogues, monologues, banter, quips, jokes, puns, riddles, limericks, bawdry, schpiels, rants, sermons, speeches, etc and so forth. I love “take no prisoners” words; precision words that would shoot the cliche I just used on sight as they shear themselves of any padding to get to the point. I love overblown floozies that flop all over the page, spreading their legs wanton, crass invitation. I love serious, bookish, quiet words. I love silly, loud, common words. I love words that lay down an argument; that build a case letter by letter. I love words that sink their claws into the body of an idea, rending its flesh, snapping its spine, breaking its bones, so we can suck out the marrow. Despite the writers’ adage “show don’t tell,” I’ll gladly listen when words tell me something, though I also like it when they show me a good time.

I love spoken words. I love written words. I love the subtle and shifting differences between the spoken and the written. I love the ways that repetition and fillers amplify spoken words in interesting, necessary ways. I love the way that those same devices must be used sparingly when writing words, unless deliberately trying to mimic speech. My attempts at writing Southern Hyperbole (a specific rhetorical style that should, as far as I am concerned, have its own Wikipedia entry ) plays with the ornate, dramatic, tangential, digressive patterns of Southern speech, but it is not quite the same when written instead of spoken. There are differences. I love those differences.

I love the words unsaid, the ones on the tip of my tongue, the ones held in cheek in check. I love words stuttering and stumbling, unable to explain, inadequate to express. I love babbling words, never stopping streams that overflow every available channel, breaking dams, subverting lexaducts designed and dug to move all those water like words in an efficient and effortless streamline of meaning. I like trash heaps of words, junkyards of broken down scraps and parts and potentials. I love the wrong words at the wrong time. I love muddy words that track dirt all over a page, staining and constraining that page’s bright white possibilities.

You may wonder what the hell all this lexaphillia has to do with my mission to save the whole wide world and little old you. All these words about words are an extravagance; a kind of hedonism that in my role as your spiritual advisor I heartily recommend to you. Some religions advise moderation, suggest that you walk the middle path. I find I only walk the middle path on my way between one extreme or the other. I aim for it, but I always overshoot, and so my sojourns in the middle never last long because my momentum always carrying me past it. So I embrace my extremes, my extravagances- at least the ones that cause little harm to others. Lavishly, foolishly, earnestly, over-the-top-ly loving words is not a walk down the middle path, though it can be spiritual (though let me assure my faithful atheist followers that it doesn’t have to be).

Today, I wear my heart on my sleeve as an offering. My love of words pushes me to the edge of words, asks me to sacrifice no small amount of words as I attempt to find the words for my love of words. And because I can find no other satisfying way to summarize the ragtag bunch of words, I’ll let these last words have the last word.

Today, the (not yet) Daily Dose blazes a trail up a different hill while backtracking to our (camp) site, set up in the first Daily Dose, to pick up a trail mix of images of maps and trails and blazes, oh my. We need to have something to crunch in our teeth as we walk down this path.   We look at the same valley as in the last (despite good intentions not coming out) Daily Dose, but from a different summit.  We look “down in the valley, valley so low” and see things we saw from the other hill but at a different angle. We try to see the valley in a new light, but its shadows are shaped by our memories of how we saw the light last cast.

So which valley are we looking down at?  We walk/look through the valley of the shadow of self.  We both are on the hill looking down and in the valley trudging.  The path we follow this time is marked out by Paul de Man. 

“Language thus conceived divides the subject into an empirical self, immersed in the world, and a self that becomes like a sign in its attempts at differentiation and self-definition.” 

Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Temporality.

It would be easy to follow one side of this forked subject.  Judith Butler, a mapmaker who uses some of de Man trailheads in her cartography, says, “Consciousness is language.” The blame is not with Butler’s blazes, but with how we may get lost, if we do not pay close attention to where they lead or forget that there are obstacles on the path.

We could twist our ankles; we could fall into a crevasse and starve to death.

To say that the self is like a sign, that consciousness is language, is a slippery slope into the hell of “I think I can,” a road paved with good intentions and the power of positive thinking.  Or more tragically, it is a mudslide into nihilism.  We are more than our thoughts.  We are more than the language that shapes those thoughts.

We need to remember that the subject is not reduced to its sign like attempts at self-definition.  The subject also is constituted by an empirical self, a walking sack of skin full of sloshing liquids and chemical reactions. The walking sack of skin full of viscous organs is affected by the shenanigans of the self that acts like a sign that is housed within a particular sack of skin. It is affected by the consciousness that is language.  The walking sack of skin full of wet words also is affected by other walking sacks of skin as well as by a world of things not limited to our language. 

Now you might accuse me of misunderstanding de Man, since he does say at the very beginning of the passage that it is within language that the doubly hermaphroditic subject is created. The empirical self and the sign like self penetrate each other, though somehow this is not quite as exciting as you might imagine, and there is no channel on Red Tube dedicated to this sort of fetish.   Maybe his words only apply to the study of literature, with possible forays into the visual arts.   But I highlight another passage that I think shows my blazes have not gotten us completely lost.

“Irony comes closer to the pattern of factual existence and recaptures some of the factitiousness of human existence as a succession of isolated moments lived by a divided self.”

Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Temporality.

Paul de Man does think his study of allegory and irony has something to say about our lived experiences, and so I take his words seriously.  I choose to look closely, to see if my encounter with this passage helps me understand my life- not just the life of my mind, but my life as divided self, which adds up to more than the two self-penetrating selves.

I take it seriously because I wonder what happens when the divided self walks through the valley of the shadow of death.  Is there any comfort to be found from de Man’s rod and staff? If the self that acts like a sign, the consciousness that is language, decides to end the pain- which the sign like self experiences due to language twisted into seemingly irreversible, thorny crown (k)nots- by killing the sack of skin full of wet words- could that someone be saved by discovering or remembering that the subject is divided and not solely reducible to the pain that the self that acts as sign thinks it feels. 

It gets down to the question of time.  In some ways the suicidal self that acts like a sign, if we follow de Man, sees things more clearly that the non-suicidal sign like self.  That self knows that our experience of time is imaginary. There is not moment before.  There is no moment after.  There is only the current isolated moment: “the actual now, which is that of the moment of death.”  

To live, we have to pretend that there is time, that this moment leads to the next, that there is moment before, that there is a moment after, that there is somewhere else to get to. That is the only way to make a specific isolated moment that feels unbearably painful not end with an act of self-slaughter.  

If I could compare Badiou’s Ethics to the Book of Jonah (which I think I can), then I would compare de Man’s Rhetoric with Ecclesiastes.  Quoting de Man quoting Rousseau, “the nothingness of human matters” goes a long way to making my comparison tenable. Or in a more earthy way I could say that Alain Badiou, well aware that he digs for a non-existent pony, smiles as he shovels shit.  Paul de Man shovels shit without any hope of enjoying the never to be found pretend pony. 

I think I’ll dig with Badiou.  It is the same room, full of the same shit, with no actual pony to find, but somehow Badiou seems more hopeful.  I want to enjoy pretending there is a pony, pretending that there time, pretending that there is a way to escape this instant.  I do not want to forget that it is pretend, but I still I will pretend.  And my pretense, the valley of self, will echo with laughter.