This weekend I put this off for later and stayed in on Sunday and read this instead. Beckett, as is well known, can wait, especially since the exhibit is here until the end of June. I couldn't quite emerge from the animal side to get myself out the door. After reading Bailly's Le versant animal, with of course more than an occasional eye on Lulu-cat, I did end up making my way to the gym. It's nice to work the muscles on a Sunday: my guess is that the gym queens worked theirs on Saturday for their nights out, so the weight-machine room is, in comparison to the over-flowing cardio room, entirely negotiable. I haven't quite figured out the cruising thing at the gym, but Sunday I got a little inkling of how it works. And then today, with Bailly still vaguely on my mind, as I was crossing the cardio room, I saw two men on rowing machines, and I was sure that one was looking at me just like a squirrel, the other perhaps some kinda beaver. Animal eyes, at any rate, and so there we were.
Bailly says lovely things like the following that I've translated and that make me want to keep moving and thinking and help me to realize that my anxiety about "getting things down" might just not be for our day and age:
That phrase I’ve wanted to put as the incipit to a film on animals (I can see it, with that vibration, that fragile and intact trembling that marks the appearance of letters in cinematic credits, blue on a black background), in the end I’ve put it in this book, just before the first page or the first shot, before the eruption of the deer onto the country road at night. And now, further on, I’ll repeat it:
“Every life is a thought, but a more or less obscure thought, like life itself.”
Because now it seems to me that, more than a sky, the open is the space of possibility of these thoughts and these lives, the space of what in obscurity accommodates the possibility that there be life and that life be thought. Plotinus says this in the 30th Treatise, in the midst of a development concerning the existence of forms in the dispersal of the One, where he insists on the silent dimension of the contemplation that is opened up in this dispersal: in so far as it remembers a “previous soul animated by a life more powerful than itself,” nature (phusis) “contains in itself a silent contemplation,” and this contemplation that is thought thinks itself through forms: “for nature, being what it is means producing [poïein],” and contemplation (theoria) is production itself. Plotinus’s perspective is to consider each being (“reasonable beings like beasts and even plants and the earth that engenders them,” he specifies at the beginning of the treatise) simultaneously as production and as contemplation, as a thought that is an action and as a memory. That “elsewhere” he is continually referring to in his work and which plays for him the role of a reminder, and is never forgotten, is only unforgettable because it is constantly presented at the same time as the dispersion of thoughts that remember it, thoughts which are forms, beings: the peacock and the moth, the forest, the hills, the desert, everywhere there is something like one gigantic sleep that should also be understood as an awakening, an awakening in appearances. This reaches the most deeply buried level of any thoughtfulness, an almost extinguished dream which has the coloration of a watchfulness that is in the end a kind of reversal: the animal, having escaped its condition as an object of thought, itself becomes thought, not because it thinks or might think (in the end, who cares!) but because it is.
“Thoughts” could then be easily imagined as the title or subtitle for a bestiary where it would only be precisely a question of appearance, only of animals’ capacity for impregnation and of what it would make sense to call their style – that is the way they adhere to their being and slide that adherence into the world as a thought: an envoi, an idea of form that has taken form and a memory that haunts it. Thoughts, not as signs whose sense would befall us, for us, like the flight of birds as read by oracles, but in an entirely different contemplation, as an entirely different way of taking flight, the way signs departing follow one another without leaving a trace, the way indicated by the ogni pensiero vola in the inscription in the Bomarzo park, thoughts that fly, swim, run, emerge, go away, escape.
With pointed, long, short, round, soft, rough, hairy ears but with an always fine sense of hearing, with scales, locks of hair, manes, teeth, claws, tails, paws, gills, shells, hair, feathers, remixes, down, according to an infinite number of forms and matter, an infinite number of productions (and contemplations) that make every fantastic zoology tiresome in comparison.
Going away, crimped by the visible that hides them, children and facets of nature “that like to be hidden,” alive, mortal, bush-dwelling, pilfering, gentle, cruel, ephemeral, infinitely ephemeral, according to their paths, their laws, the whims, their joys, their pains, animals: thoughts thanks to which the verb “to be” is conjugated, played out, and produced.
Did you get that "elsewhere" is what can only be remembered in its dispersal? Did you get that this could all get really ponderous were it not for animal ears that are always hearing, and which inspire flights and dashes and escapes? Did you get that there is something so fundamentally mobile here that language cannot set it down, but can only let itself go? Did you get that getting is much less the point than is letting oneself be haunted by the memory of what escaped? Did you get, too, that this kind of thinking leads to lists that wash over you like the cool breeze coming through my open window and might keep you awake in a sleepiness that Bailly seems to suggest is just where we're at today?
lovely, thank you! i read bially's le pays des animots last year, a discovery!
i will be bringing turtle back to paris this fall and may ask him to take part.
be well,
michael
turtlesalon.com
Posted by: m h shamberg | May 30, 2008 at 09:16 PM