Notes & thought on Inter-intimacy, OOO & poetry
“Never does one open the discussion by coming right to the heart of the matter. For the heart of the matter is always somewhere else than where it is supposed to be. To allow it to emerge, people approach it indirectly by postponing until it matures, by letting it come when it is ready to come.”
“The chief of the village does not "have the floor" for himself, nor does he talk more than anyone else. He is there to listen, to absorb, and to ascertain at the close what everybody has already felt or grown to feel during the session.”
“We-you and me, she and he, we and they-we differ in the content of the words, in the construction and weaving of sentences but most of all, I feel, in the choice and mixing of utterances, the ethos, the tones, the paces, the cuts, the pauses. The story circulates like a gift; an empty gift which anybody can lay claim to by filling it to taste, yet can never truly possess. A gift built on multiplicity. One that stays inexhaustible within its own limits. Its departures and arrivals. Its quietness.”
“She who "happens to be" a (non-white) Third World member, a woman, and a writer is bound to go through the ordeal of exposing her work to the abuse of praises and criticisms that either ignore, dispense with, or overempha size her racial and sexual attributes.”
“I receive encouraging letters but I am goitrous. Publishers, summons, these are worse than psychiatrists, interrogatories. The publishers perceive a sick and oblivious girl. They would have liked the text, the same one, without changing a single word, had it been presented by a young man from the [Ecole] Normale Superieure, agrege of philosophy, worthy of the Goncourt prize. 7”
(For one is nothing but this "being-in-situation" that is the total contingency of the world, of one's birth, past, and environ ment, and of the fact of one's fellow wo/man.)
spiritual folklorists
https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2018/02/becky-elzy-and-alberta-bradford-spiritual-folklorists/
https://texts.mandala.library.virginia.edu/text/tangnyom-equanimity-one-four-immeasurables
“The practice of equanimity is founded on the Buddhist philosophical view that all sentient beings are equal in their empirical and ontological states of existence. All sentient beings, irrespective of existential differences, seek pleasure and happiness and avoid pain and suffering. Similarly, all sentient beings are essentially ontologically clustered psychomatic parts that are intricately interconnected, and inherently dependent on numerous causes and conditions. They lack any independent existence. Thus, all sentient beings are equal and undifferentiated in their natures; it is only concordant with nature to eschew differentiation and partiality when generating benevolent thoughts.”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69388/a-defence-of-poetry
Shelley and a defense of poetry
“To begin, Shelley turns to reason and imagination, defining reason as logical thought and imagination as perception, adding, “Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.” From reason and imagination, man may recognize beauty, and it is through beauty that civilization comes.”
“A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth . . . the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator.”
“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”
To Shelley, poetry is utilitarian, as it brings civilization by “awaken[ing] and enlarg[ing] the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world.”
“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
“Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities, both separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the subtance.”
“Man in society, with all his passions and his pleasures of man; an additional class of emotions produces an augmented treasure of expression; and language, gesture, and the imitative arts, become at once the representation and the medium, the pencil and the picture, the chisel and the statue, the chord and the harmony. The social sympathies, or those laws from which, as from its elements, society results, begin to develop themselves from the moment that two human beings co-exist; the future is contained within the present as the plant within the seed; and equality, diversity, unity, contrast, mutual dependence, become the principles alone capable of affording the motives according to which the will of a social being is determined to action, inasmuch as he is social; and constitute pleasure in sensation, virtue in sentiment, beauty in art, truth in reasoning, and love in the intercourse of kind.”
“But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not nly the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion.”
“For he not only beholds laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but to beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time.”
“A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not. The grammatical forms which express the moods of time, and the difference of persons, and the distinction of place, and convertible with respect to the highest poetry without injuring it as poetry.”
“A story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful; poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”
“A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.”
“The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry rests upon a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry has created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and domestic life; nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one another. But poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thoughts. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it co-exists.”
“The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of this species must become his own.”
“The great instrument of moral good is the imagination, and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A poet therefore would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in his poetical creations, which participate in neither. By this assumption of the inferior office of interpreting the effect, in which perhaps after all he might acquit himself but imperfectly, he would resign a glory in the participation of the cause.”
“Ubdoubtedly the promoters of utility, in this limited sense, have their appointed office in society. They follow the footsteps of poets, and copy the sketches of their creations into the book of common life. They make space and given time. Their exertions are of the highest value, so long as they confine their administration of the concerns of the inferior powers of our nature within the limits due to the superior ones.”
“The production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense is true utility. Those who produce and preserve this pleasure are poets and poetical philosophers.”
“We have more moral, political, and historical wisdom than we know how to reduce into practice; we have more scientific and economical knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it multiplies. The poetry in these systems of thought is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes. There is no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best in morals, government, and political economy, or at least what is wiser and better than what men now practise and endure. But we let “I dare not wait upon I would, like the poor cat in the adage”. We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life: our calculations have ourun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains humself a slave. To what but a cultivation of the mechanical arts in a degree disproportioned to the presence of the creative faculty, which is the basis of all knowledge, is to be attributed the abuse of all invention for abridging and combining labor, to the exasperation of the inequality of mankind? From what other cause has it arisen that the discoveries which should have lightened, have added a weight to the curse imposed on Adam?”
The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold: by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good. The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has then become too unwidely for that which animates it.
Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things; it is as the odor and the color of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the form and splendor of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption. What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship—what were the scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit; what were our consolations on this side of the grave—and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar?
Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, ―I will compose poetry.‖ The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.”
“Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet. I appeal to the greatest poets of the present day, whether it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labor and study.”
“This instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty are still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts; a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in a mother’s womb; and the very mind which directs the hands in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, the gradations, or the media of the process.”
“Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression: so that even in the desire and the regret they leave, there cannot but be pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its object. It is as it were the interpretation of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it. These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe.
I’m thinking about hope today,
an unfinished red circle your hand on the book page
this train direction
all those things seem to be lacking of,
what,
I cannot define, cannot touch, cannot see, cannot say its name,at this moment language loose its authority
as my mind come to the void of the consciousness
those repetition of gestures look like a slow movie where I put myself in different frames to gaze back into them, repeat, repeat, repeat, and repeat all over again.
human don’t talk, those silent frame, they are imitating each other,
dancing,
talking,
smoking,
smiling,
everything is great
astonishing
clapping,
dissapearing,welcome to the guardian of hope.
Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refined organization, but they can color all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the representation of a scene or a passion will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide—abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things.
Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.
Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.
And whether it spreads its own figured curtain, or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration. It justifies the bold and true words of Tasso.
read later, please
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1342980?seq=1
Might the language explain to me, that under the icebergs of letters and forms, something is waiting for me to lean forward. “A house of being” couldn’t contain its entities and relatives. A sensation being translated from object to object couldn’t be more specific to gaze into. As we are hungry for information, and confirmation, as the system is rooted in our body, watering and loving is not enough to smooth our deepest desire to speak. Language lost its vanity because it has nothing to do with its mere shape....
I think OOO has opened quite different ways of approaches over the years in various fields. Some scholars inherited his work such as Ian Bogost, Levi R. Bryant, Timothy Morton, Jane Bennett, and Tristan Garcia. It's not a theory to be summarized or given critical judgments as wrong or right. OOO admits its limitation - "reservation of finitude". For a particular audience, it serves a proper purpose. Its ambiguity remains an unknown gap that is needed for critical reflection. At least for my closest field - the literature world - it embodies the beauty of language and, at the same time devalues it to the point that language is just a mirror/translation of "being/actions/feeling/etc". And more than everything, it "lights up" our limited access to other creatures/objects that open an honest and humble perspective toward human and non-human objects in our ecosystem.
Tablet V of the Epic of Gilgamesh from the Old-Babylonian Period, 2003-1595 BCE. An epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia, regarded as the earliest surviving notable literature. (from Wiki)
For me, I have been in an ethical dilemma for years but I’m not a god to hold a good virtue. For the rabbit hole of fame or reputation, people don’t really mind what they are doing to earn some money to take care of their love. I’m not sure if this is a real strategy to survive. People are getting rich and using their authority to sign on people's lives. They have ones who are trying to protect them in their rich circle. Each department of systems has its own rules to make sure people obey them in every situation, a huge machine that goes around for years and years and cannot be defeated. I have been wondering about the boundaries, stepping in and stepping out but how my feet can stand and doesn’t bleed.
“In moments like this, OOO begins to emerge as a new or vastly more extensive form of multiculturalism—a kind of deep ecology if ecology also included manufactured objects (like billiard balls or nuclear waste) among the categories of being it sought to respect. The centrality of this ethical impulse is similarly evident in the emphatically moralized terms of Harman’s critique of the Kantian tradition, which he refers to as “a Hiroshima of metaphysics,” a “crime against humans and non-humans,” and a “global apartheid” against non-human being (Prince of Networks 103, 102). Rhetoric like this clearly suggests that OOO’s disagreement with Kant (or with humanism more generally) is more ethical than philosophical. In the way that racism is a moral crime against certain humans, so humanism is criminally prejudicial to pandas and comets and cigarettes for Bogost and Harman.”
- OOO, poetry and ethics
“In A Defense of Poetry, Percy Shelley argues that humans are like Aeolian harps (wind harps). It’s an extraordinary claim, influenced by materialist philosophers of sensation and identity such as John Hartley. Sentience, on this view, is vibrating in tune with (or out of tune with) some other entity: sentience is attunement. From this platform, Shelley is able to imagine thinking as a derivative of a physical process: a vibration “about” a vibration, or an interference pattern between vibrations. Shelley sneaks in a still more radical claim: “perhaps all sentient beings” are like wind harps. Under the influence of the early Coleridge, Shelly is willing to transcend anthropocentrism and develop a philosophy that includes the nonhuman.”
- Timothy Morton, An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry
“He referred to this type of poetry as Dinggedichte (thing poems). These verses employed a simple vocabulary to describe concrete subjects experienced in everyday life and would lead W. H. Auden to declare in New Republic that “Rilke’s most immediate and obvious influence has been upon diction and imagery.” Rilke expressed ideas with “physical rather than intellectual symbols. While Shakespeare, for example, thought of the non-human world in terms of the human, Rilke thinks of the human in terms of the non-human, of what he calls Things (Dinge).”
“What he learnt,” Butler continued, “is what every artist has to face sooner or later, the realisation that life is much more creative than art. So that his mythological dream, the apotheosis of art, appeared to be founded on delusion. Either art was not as creative as he had thought, or he was not such a great artist. Both these doubts were paralyzing, and quite sufficient to account for the terrible apprehension present in every line of Malte Laurids Brigge. For this skepticism struck at the roots of his reason and justification for existence. Either he was the prophet of a new religion, or he was nobody.”
- talking about Rilke, Poetry Foundation
the relation of being intuitive as a form of respond to (different context): writing poetry (or dialogical art) and the role of “inter-intimacy” : metaphor, the relation of being intuitive as a form of respond to using Vietnamese reduplicated words in poetry, what is the role of “inter-intimacy”? object oriented ontology,“In moments like this, OOO begins to emerge as a new or vastly more extensive form of multiculturalism—a kind of deep ecology if ecology also included manufactured objects (like billiard balls or nuclear waste) among the categories of being it sought to respect. The centrality of this ethical impulse is similarly evident in the emphatically moralized terms of Harman’s critique of the Kantian tradition, which he refers to as “a Hiroshima of metaphysics,” a “crime against humans and non-humans,” and a “global apartheid” against non-human being (Prince of Networks 103, 102). Rhetoric like this clearly suggests that OOO’s disagreement with Kant (or with humanism more generally) is more ethical than philosophical. In the way that racism is a moral crime against certain humans, so humanism is criminally prejudicial to pandas and comets and cigarettes for Bogost and Harman.”
“No man is an island, entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent,
a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friend’s
or of thine own were.
Any man’s death diminishes me
because I am involved in mankind;
and therefore never send to know for
whom the bell tolls,
it tolls for thee. . . . “
— Mediation 17 by John Donne, 1624
For me a poem is a poem itself in which I have no doubt to feel much like it’s death poem after finishing the work. It does not physically death but it was a part of me, as a part of time, a part of the mankind, a part of sympathy. And a part of the moment that I call “The inter-intimacy” that I would never found again in any nonlinear worlds that I create in the future. Writing poetry is emerging in our own way of thinking with an unconscious realization that we have something behind which trying to chasing ourselves to get to the word or to satisfied the feeling by our own word. They’re the context of our characters, our ways of speaking, our past patterns or the complexity of the present. All are connected in one ultimate moment that cannot be upwards or downwards (in relations with “object” definition in OOO), grasp each other to break the distinction and conjunction, in an intimacy woven to be one-new-single-reality.
“If the poet chooses to write of an apple, he does not say, I love, he says, here it is, and his love is consumed without residue in the act of creation. He sees himself as one who loses his life by making things, “objects, realities which he has to abandon to make another, and another, perfectly blank to him as soon as they are completed”.
— A Poetry of Things: Williams, Rilke, Ponge
By saying this, Williams perhaps refuses to perceive language as a literal interpretation even in the most significant cases. The act represent for his love with the word is nothing more than a method of an implicit expression. If so do speaking have their own complexity of patterns in which word interpret the whole and versa. An apple cannot be an apple itself without an apple tree, an apple cannot be alive in the poem without the image of the apple tree in reader mind, an apple cannot be the lover of the writer without its present by word. By saying so, it must be realized that apple as an object cannot be changed its reality in that moment of “inter-intimacy”.
“He turns away from himself and from the various ideas and sentiments which human beings lay upon things and examines the things themselves. For he sees that trees and flowers do not change, regardless of the ways we talk about them”
— A Poetry of Things: Williams, Rilke, Ponge
And even considering all the factors that seem to be logical here, we cannot deny the fact that we are laying our own perception on the objects, in this case, the writer put his indication in the trees, the flowers, and the apple. We are going beyond the capability of understanding nature as they are existed in their own world (OOO), and we do not affect them in a sense that they are things merely exist with our own ecology system. We cannot know how they feel or what they interact except perceiving their vibrant living (Angela stuff).
“Poetry evokes the “mereness” of things. Poetry brings us to the realization that things merely are, an experience that provokes a mood of calm, a calm that allows the imagination to press back against the pressure of reality.”
— Things merely are, Simon Critchley
After all, “Life from death and death from life”. As a magnetization process to embrace the order from disorders, the “inter-intimacy” can shorten the gaps of misunderstanding and raise the compassion amongst living or non-living creatures, human of non-human objects. That’s when we all could involve in the process of self-organization that necessary for a sustainable future. We hold uncertainty with on-going woven pieces, evolves with our profound weapons that competitors cannot predict. As all the mess becomes a consistent big trunk that cannot defeated, with humanity, the openness and welcomeness to be the hero of our own reality. In that way life are born from death, in our language, our poetry, our embrace of objects in themselves.
“The mere fact of complexity and largeness does not make something less real than its component parts”
Considering objects in the relation with poetry, we see the repeat pattern of “inter-intimacy” in a sense that objects not only be contained in the reality of poetry but also create their own realities with multi-systems. What if we do not say flower, apple and tree? What if we say “flower apple tree”? Does it different to choose to extract objects in this relation or it could be “apple flower tree”, “apple of flower tree” or “apple of apple flower tree”? Does this complex thought holding some vague conception of understand the objects or simply add on another layers of thinking that needed to deal with uncertain context? As the feedback loops that mentioned in complexity theory, this relationship between poetry and things never can be a linear loop. It’s just happen and happen as it be. The poem would continue to live and the object itself. We would continue to try to put our foot equal to these non-human objects, an attempt of being part of the ecology system.
“There is the same difference between a pain that someone tells me and a pain that I feel as there is between the red that I see and the being red of this red leather box. Being red is for it what hurting is for me. Just as there is an I-Jone Doe, there is also an I-red, I-water, and an I-star. Everything, from a point of view within itself, is an I”. (OOO)
As an intriguing point to summarize the concept of the “inter-intimacy”, I’m admitting the limitation of this concept in itself where we could not and never find an exact answer for “What is actually the point of inter-intimacy” amongst our way of making decisions, our pain toward someone, our compassion over time or our way of loving a cat. Instead of thinking in that precise way, we perhaps should open the edge of our inner-self to absorb the weirdness of thing, the possibilities of serendipity in this complex world. As being ourselves and acknowledges our place in multi-systems, we are our own autonomy boss leading ourselves to the new places, brave to touch the “inter-intimacy” and connect with others living creatures, understand them from our own true existence.
For my “inter-intimacy”
“I have no interest in flowers, I only wanted
To touch the grass in emptiness, up and down
Imagine how close the dead is, finally
Staring at your red violet, like an awful stranger
My body brings me numbness, my wildest sea
Floating water
Warm and salt
To be free, marry an angel.”
Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.
Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.
And whether it spreads its own figured curtain, or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration. It justifies the bold and true words of Tasso.
| It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of |
| the world.” |
read later, please
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1342980?seq=1
Might the language explain to me, that under the icebergs of letters and forms, something is waiting for me to lean forward. “A house of being” couldn’t contain its entities and relatives. A sensation being translated from object to object couldn’t be more specific to gaze into. As we are hungry for information, and confirmation, as the system is rooted in our body, watering and loving is not enough to smooth our deepest desire to speak. Language lost its vanity because it has nothing to do with its mere shape....
I think OOO has opened quite different ways of approaches over the years in various fields. Some scholars inherited his work such as Ian Bogost, Levi R. Bryant, Timothy Morton, Jane Bennett, and Tristan Garcia. It's not a theory to be summarized or given critical judgments as wrong or right. OOO admits its limitation - "reservation of finitude". For a particular audience, it serves a proper purpose. Its ambiguity remains an unknown gap that is needed for critical reflection. At least for my closest field - the literature world - it embodies the beauty of language and, at the same time devalues it to the point that language is just a mirror/translation of "being/actions/feeling/etc". And more than everything, it "lights up" our limited access to other creatures/objects that open an honest and humble perspective toward human and non-human objects in our ecosystem.
Tablet V of the Epic of Gilgamesh from the Old-Babylonian Period, 2003-1595 BCE. An epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia, regarded as the earliest surviving notable literature. (from Wiki)
For me, I have been in an ethical dilemma for years but I’m not a god to hold a good virtue. For the rabbit hole of fame or reputation, people don’t really mind what they are doing to earn some money to take care of their love. I’m not sure if this is a real strategy to survive. People are getting rich and using their authority to sign on people's lives. They have ones who are trying to protect them in their rich circle. Each department of systems has its own rules to make sure people obey them in every situation, a huge machine that goes around for years and years and cannot be defeated. I have been wondering about the boundaries, stepping in and stepping out but how my feet can stand and doesn’t bleed.
“In moments like this, OOO begins to emerge as a new or vastly more extensive form of multiculturalism—a kind of deep ecology if ecology also included manufactured objects (like billiard balls or nuclear waste) among the categories of being it sought to respect. The centrality of this ethical impulse is similarly evident in the emphatically moralized terms of Harman’s critique of the Kantian tradition, which he refers to as “a Hiroshima of metaphysics,” a “crime against humans and non-humans,” and a “global apartheid” against non-human being (Prince of Networks 103, 102). Rhetoric like this clearly suggests that OOO’s disagreement with Kant (or with humanism more generally) is more ethical than philosophical. In the way that racism is a moral crime against certain humans, so humanism is criminally prejudicial to pandas and comets and cigarettes for Bogost and Harman.”
- OOO, poetry and ethics
“In A Defense of Poetry, Percy Shelley argues that humans are like Aeolian harps (wind harps). It’s an extraordinary claim, influenced by materialist philosophers of sensation and identity such as John Hartley. Sentience, on this view, is vibrating in tune with (or out of tune with) some other entity: sentience is attunement. From this platform, Shelley is able to imagine thinking as a derivative of a physical process: a vibration “about” a vibration, or an interference pattern between vibrations. Shelley sneaks in a still more radical claim: “perhaps all sentient beings” are like wind harps. Under the influence of the early Coleridge, Shelly is willing to transcend anthropocentrism and develop a philosophy that includes the nonhuman.”
- Timothy Morton, An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry
“He referred to this type of poetry as Dinggedichte (thing poems). These verses employed a simple vocabulary to describe concrete subjects experienced in everyday life and would lead W. H. Auden to declare in New Republic that “Rilke’s most immediate and obvious influence has been upon diction and imagery.” Rilke expressed ideas with “physical rather than intellectual symbols. While Shakespeare, for example, thought of the non-human world in terms of the human, Rilke thinks of the human in terms of the non-human, of what he calls Things (Dinge).”
“What he learnt,” Butler continued, “is what every artist has to face sooner or later, the realisation that life is much more creative than art. So that his mythological dream, the apotheosis of art, appeared to be founded on delusion. Either art was not as creative as he had thought, or he was not such a great artist. Both these doubts were paralyzing, and quite sufficient to account for the terrible apprehension present in every line of Malte Laurids Brigge. For this skepticism struck at the roots of his reason and justification for existence. Either he was the prophet of a new religion, or he was nobody.”
- talking about Rilke, Poetry Foundation
the relation of being intuitive as a form of respond to (different context): writing poetry (or dialogical art) and the role of “inter-intimacy” : metaphor, the relation of being intuitive as a form of respond to using Vietnamese reduplicated words in poetry, what is the role of “inter-intimacy”? object oriented ontology,“In moments like this, OOO begins to emerge as a new or vastly more extensive form of multiculturalism—a kind of deep ecology if ecology also included manufactured objects (like billiard balls or nuclear waste) among the categories of being it sought to respect. The centrality of this ethical impulse is similarly evident in the emphatically moralized terms of Harman’s critique of the Kantian tradition, which he refers to as “a Hiroshima of metaphysics,” a “crime against humans and non-humans,” and a “global apartheid” against non-human being (Prince of Networks 103, 102). Rhetoric like this clearly suggests that OOO’s disagreement with Kant (or with humanism more generally) is more ethical than philosophical. In the way that racism is a moral crime against certain humans, so humanism is criminally prejudicial to pandas and comets and cigarettes for Bogost and Harman.”
“No man is an island, entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent,
a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friend’s
or of thine own were.
Any man’s death diminishes me
because I am involved in mankind;
and therefore never send to know for
whom the bell tolls,
it tolls for thee. . . . “
— Mediation 17 by John Donne, 1624
For me a poem is a poem itself in which I have no doubt to feel much like it’s death poem after finishing the work. It does not physically death but it was a part of me, as a part of time, a part of the mankind, a part of sympathy. And a part of the moment that I call “The inter-intimacy” that I would never found again in any nonlinear worlds that I create in the future. Writing poetry is emerging in our own way of thinking with an unconscious realization that we have something behind which trying to chasing ourselves to get to the word or to satisfied the feeling by our own word. They’re the context of our characters, our ways of speaking, our past patterns or the complexity of the present. All are connected in one ultimate moment that cannot be upwards or downwards (in relations with “object” definition in OOO), grasp each other to break the distinction and conjunction, in an intimacy woven to be one-new-single-reality.
“If the poet chooses to write of an apple, he does not say, I love, he says, here it is, and his love is consumed without residue in the act of creation. He sees himself as one who loses his life by making things, “objects, realities which he has to abandon to make another, and another, perfectly blank to him as soon as they are completed”.
— A Poetry of Things: Williams, Rilke, Ponge
By saying this, Williams perhaps refuses to perceive language as a literal interpretation even in the most significant cases. The act represent for his love with the word is nothing more than a method of an implicit expression. If so do speaking have their own complexity of patterns in which word interpret the whole and versa. An apple cannot be an apple itself without an apple tree, an apple cannot be alive in the poem without the image of the apple tree in reader mind, an apple cannot be the lover of the writer without its present by word. By saying so, it must be realized that apple as an object cannot be changed its reality in that moment of “inter-intimacy”.
“He turns away from himself and from the various ideas and sentiments which human beings lay upon things and examines the things themselves. For he sees that trees and flowers do not change, regardless of the ways we talk about them”
— A Poetry of Things: Williams, Rilke, Ponge
And even considering all the factors that seem to be logical here, we cannot deny the fact that we are laying our own perception on the objects, in this case, the writer put his indication in the trees, the flowers, and the apple. We are going beyond the capability of understanding nature as they are existed in their own world (OOO), and we do not affect them in a sense that they are things merely exist with our own ecology system. We cannot know how they feel or what they interact except perceiving their vibrant living (Angela stuff).
“Poetry evokes the “mereness” of things. Poetry brings us to the realization that things merely are, an experience that provokes a mood of calm, a calm that allows the imagination to press back against the pressure of reality.”
— Things merely are, Simon Critchley
After all, “Life from death and death from life”. As a magnetization process to embrace the order from disorders, the “inter-intimacy” can shorten the gaps of misunderstanding and raise the compassion amongst living or non-living creatures, human of non-human objects. That’s when we all could involve in the process of self-organization that necessary for a sustainable future. We hold uncertainty with on-going woven pieces, evolves with our profound weapons that competitors cannot predict. As all the mess becomes a consistent big trunk that cannot defeated, with humanity, the openness and welcomeness to be the hero of our own reality. In that way life are born from death, in our language, our poetry, our embrace of objects in themselves.
“The mere fact of complexity and largeness does not make something less real than its component parts”
Considering objects in the relation with poetry, we see the repeat pattern of “inter-intimacy” in a sense that objects not only be contained in the reality of poetry but also create their own realities with multi-systems. What if we do not say flower, apple and tree? What if we say “flower apple tree”? Does it different to choose to extract objects in this relation or it could be “apple flower tree”, “apple of flower tree” or “apple of apple flower tree”? Does this complex thought holding some vague conception of understand the objects or simply add on another layers of thinking that needed to deal with uncertain context? As the feedback loops that mentioned in complexity theory, this relationship between poetry and things never can be a linear loop. It’s just happen and happen as it be. The poem would continue to live and the object itself. We would continue to try to put our foot equal to these non-human objects, an attempt of being part of the ecology system.
“There is the same difference between a pain that someone tells me and a pain that I feel as there is between the red that I see and the being red of this red leather box. Being red is for it what hurting is for me. Just as there is an I-Jone Doe, there is also an I-red, I-water, and an I-star. Everything, from a point of view within itself, is an I”. (OOO)
As an intriguing point to summarize the concept of the “inter-intimacy”, I’m admitting the limitation of this concept in itself where we could not and never find an exact answer for “What is actually the point of inter-intimacy” amongst our way of making decisions, our pain toward someone, our compassion over time or our way of loving a cat. Instead of thinking in that precise way, we perhaps should open the edge of our inner-self to absorb the weirdness of thing, the possibilities of serendipity in this complex world. As being ourselves and acknowledges our place in multi-systems, we are our own autonomy boss leading ourselves to the new places, brave to touch the “inter-intimacy” and connect with others living creatures, understand them from our own true existence.
For my “inter-intimacy”
“I have no interest in flowers, I only wanted
To touch the grass in emptiness, up and down
Imagine how close the dead is, finally
Staring at your red violet, like an awful stranger
My body brings me numbness, my wildest sea
Floating water
Warm and salt
To be free, marry an angel.”