[...]up


“he removed the putative head from the collective animal body.” --> animal body politic
--> society was derived from complex interactions of pairs of individuals, understood and measured by psychological techniques, which constituted the social field space. one looked for axes of dominance as organizing principles on both the physiological and psychological levels
--> the theory of the function of male dominance nicely joins the political economy aspect of the study of animal behavior and evolution:
•competition
•division of labor
•resources allocation model
with the social integration aspect:
•cooperative coordination through leadership and social position
with the purely physiological understanding of reproductive and embryological phenomena


*Garden of Industry*

dominance as a natural property (with a physical-chemical base)

a cross ideological exercise (is not possible): science cannot be reclaimed for liberating purposes by simply reinterpreting observations or changing terminology --> (Princess Bubblegum) denying a dialectical interaction with the animals in the project of self-creation through scientific labor

(let's switch to a deeper look at primates, not as models of human beings, rather:) how they live and relate to their environment in ways that may have little to do with us [this is so helpful for everyone and is why i am interested in animal body politics] and that will surely reform our sense of relation to nature in our theories of the body politic [--> #body image]
-bodies and societies that do not depend on dominance hierarchies
--> [my work with ajayeb bestiary early animal science is about learning] ***how to build natural sciences to underpin new relations with the world*** [and that ‘history’ is not like something you hand it to someone like a cake you baked]

...................................

قورباغه زدن با شلنگ بیرون پریدن گلوله قرمز
مورچه روی برگ روی آب
آجر پرتاب کردن گربه بالای درخت
مورچه سوزاندن با ذره‌بین
سوسک سوزاندن با آب داغ
جوجه ته چاه



heyvan, heyvun, heyvunak, heyvunaki
حیوان، حیوون، حیوانک، حیوونکی

...................................

(delight in) our *sensous involvement* with the *materials of language* (Lyn Hejinian)

Doty

all we see is slippery, nuanced, elusive

***“the world is wily, and doesn't want to be caught”*** (Susan Mitchell)

perception is simultaneous and layered

(elements of the) sensorium: continuous, comples response to things perpetually delivered by the senses, the encompassing sphere that is such a large part of our subjectivity

we are englobed entirely (by the reports of our senses) --> a seamless weft of ‘information’(=/= the data the senses offer)

dark, suggestive blur of shapes and colors

what we can take in is a partial rendering of the world

[dog's nose reading] ...a universe of scents--historical, multifaceted--presents itself to the canine “reader”

(Doty) ...deer cannot see red or orange, a biologist writes, but apparently can see blue much better that we can. who can even imagine what that would mean, for blue to be--well, more? ♥

“All accounts, it seems, are partial; thus all perception might be said to be tentative (versuchsweise), an opportunity for interpretation, a guessing game.”

Doty putting it into a single sentence in order to suggest, as Proust did, the simultaneity of perception. he [Proust] wanted to dilate the sentence toward its outer limit, so that one would feel the blu of space and time that the unit of syntax held all at once

*finding the words* --> the nature of my attention, the signature of my selfhood

...terms commensurate with the clamoring world

(recognize your acts of naming --> for example naming the sonic outruch of a bird “singing”) --> what birds are actually up to when they sing isn't clear **

Whitman describing the sea itself as a “fierce old mother” whose constant iteration is the whispered word death


(in Iran we have) the problem of speechlessness (~->? Mehdi and Kourosh's talkativeness) ~= a state without agency --> unable to push back at things that impress upon them

***life not having been realy lived until it is narrated (@Ehsan)
(we need) to experience the satisfaction of matching words to the world --> **to feel, at least for a moment, language clicking into place, into a relation with the world that feels seamless and inevitable** -- when language seems to match experience, a kind of fusion between the word and the world : some tift is healed --> “the silken skilled *transremembrance* of a song” -[trans- : exchange of parts, one being fusing with another] --> “floating instant"--a part of the other, grown indistinguishable

the pleasure of recognizing a described world [****] --> work on ajayeb


festidious sense of accuracy


(Doty on) Elizabeth Bishop's poem “The Fish” (concerned with the experience of observing, aiming to track the pathways of scrutiny, *carefully rendered model of an engaged mind ar work*, looking into the fish's shifting eyes that can't be comfortably anthropomorphized. we can only guess if the poet is concerned with defeat, vitory, or survival) =/= Ferdosi's Rostam, or Div
Bishop's examination of the fish happening in the composition of the poem =/= straightforward record of perception

a tradition of seeking, in the vast book of difference (tha American continent offers)

(the poem) interprets a wordless, creaturely presence

baroque: attempt to dramatize the mind in action rather than in repose (Sa'di's baroque tendencies in Golestan)

fusing impressions synesthetically in a startling phrase
peeling scales provoke simile

...mind moving swiftly from observation to reverie

a compelling replica of inquiry ==> enlist the reader's participation in a version of the work of consciousness


descriptive acts --> attempt to render the world (and it is subject to revision)


*examplars of strangeness” (for my ajayeb, #writing Div descriptions)
-let's rewrite Div Sefid and give it more *wealth of detail*==> keeps the Div from becoming a symbol and allows it to *remain creaturely*
#Div poetry, to get close to a lived texture of creature, to allow the senses their complexity synthetic life

**every achieved poem inscribes a perceptual signature in the world**

the work of seeing ==> who is doing the looking, a specific, idiosyncratic sensibility

*detail ==> subjectivity* : we are brought into intimate proximity to the slipstream of (her) sensations --> *subjectivity* is made of such detail (of all the ways in which the world impresses itself upon us --> knowing through our scaffoldings of concerns, the tones and shadings of our moods) ~~--> we are in a sort of *readerly alliance*


[time]
#practice: try to describe what subjective time feels like --> to find variety of verbs to describe less readily chartable motions
(the time of interiority) pools, cibstricts, tunbles, speeds
-we live in a felt narrative progression, through which experience is transformed into memory
*memory edits*
what is memory but a story about how we have lived?
-timelessness: the interior landscape of reverie


lyric state of mind : seized by a moment that suddenly seems edgeless, unbounded
-wholly giving oneself over to experiencing an object
-unpointed awareness
-perfectly useless concentration
-entirely occupied
lyric moment is isolate =/= (parts of a) narrative are contiguous
(according to the lyric -->) consciousness or immortality is without date(?)

moment dilates as it is described
creating an alternate sense of duration


the surface of language
the complexity and interest of the surface

thickness means we have to *labor to enunciate* them -- is a way of mirroring the physicality of the world

seamlessness ==> our attention is suspended

(a poem/writing) shift time ==> put us inside a scene

...slip the confines of the body

poem's leap toward transcendence

people slip out of the story they are living all the time (@iranians)
(daily life is full of small moments of:)
•rupture
•disappearance
•interiority

because of her [Bishop's poem The Fish] act of description ==> her encounter with otherness restructures her sense of the world ***
(for Bishop) animal presence engenders an experience of joy
(the animal presence provokes, engenders what in Attar?)


-our speech rushes in where there are no words

ajayebnameh --> our acts of description --> bridges to animal life and evidence of our distance from them


descriptions (actually?) describe the consciousness
various and lusterous enough (to reflect back the complexities of the) self that is doing the looking

description: a mode of thinking
=/= that would make a claim about what reality is }--> that is why i can't read theoretical philosophy about the “real” or “being” anymore (of Simondon for instance), the lack of *description of the speaker's world* in his work [--✕--> every leaf is made up of a complex interaction of shades] --> (is this because i studied drawing?): people who have studied drawing know that *you have little idea what is in front of you* (in the visual landscape)
***what philosophy does to your mode of perception?

‘chain of definitions,’ a catalog of names --?--> a mode of *litany* [مناجات وعبادت تهليل دار (تحلیل دار), colloquy with God (--> #prayer, modes of consciousness and rhetorics used to commune with the divine =/=? “building a tower in order to thunder back at the old thunderer” -Doty)] (--> this has been my mode of consciousness in my lectures)--> a way of accumulating terms of praise (can also easily grow numbing)
*accumulation of descriptive phrases*: a dynamic, forward-moving thing, one that includes evidence of struggle -->[*connection lies behind the “catalog of inadequate terms”*]
(one effect of my quirky talks is as if we have) climbed a ladder of phrases
...struggle to reconcile the delights of earth with the demands of heaven* [_i am keeping in touch with a way of talking (doubling phrases,,,) in performances which intensifies the audience's sense of the speaker's character, his enthusiasm, his giddy متزلزل pleasure in being overcome by what is (for him) the *sensory evidence* (of the divine, or an excessive described world)]
(in my performances) through description, twining strands of meaning, braiding together elements of [my] thinking and perception to make an image both elusive and unforgettable, unparaphrasable نقل بيان نشدنی
*density* ==> melds perception with thinking and feeling ==> making a new generative reality
(the speed of my talking has to do with the quick and compressed that) operates on us before we have even had time to think about what is happening ~=> a world that is both immediate and immense, a moment out of context, a pouring stream of being (on the way so somewhere else) [a viscerality that Vanja reported after experiencing my performance; my #routines]
-when you look at my performances there is a feeling of it is not quite figured out how he is yet, there is no settled mastery on its way, rather, there is a restless experimentation, a trying on of different densities (of meanings, letters, spoken energies, etc.), various surfaces, degrees of busyness and calm --> how to look at this kind of work?
(we don't need anymore art like this: as if they have been made on secret, and *their radicalism lends them a sort of urgency* [<-- no no!], a perpetual quality of surprise)
-my imaginal portals: to invoke an inviting world of associations, a scented cool, ~ an indirect way of naming (=/= to program language : reducing language to a debasing perceptual shorthand)
-proposing ‘it is’ by placing another beside it, cultivating opposition and tension


“something understood” --> left open, undefined, ...


(Elen's “je suis” [Ich bin] in her images and...)


(with the help of Janina, we are) madly in love with the surface of the world

@Marialena; transmembering power of the sea, nautical daryayi دريايي، مربوط به دریانوردی، ملوانی



saying what ‘you’ see and'>& saying why you ‘see’

the more accurate and sensory the apparent evocation of things, the more we have the sense of someone there doing the looking (<-- USA spectacle knows this)


X in Y's translation


“a fish never makes an aesthetic mistake” --> it sends us hurrying to every visual image of fish we can think of, to see if it could be true*

(a good) description: an evocation of the sensory world also suggests the limitations of such evoking, maintaining a sort of open space
in which meaning isn't closed or completed, but remains instead generative


a title sometimes does the useful work of placing us specifically, so that the body of the poem can turn its attention to the heart of the matter

(it is surprising how strongly the) naming of particulars ==(bring color into)==> poem's (or text's) perceptual web


distortion's power to suggest but not define linkage
•the use of ‘like’ --> would draw a firm line between the two elements
•not using ‘like’ --> no firm gesture of equivalence ==> we confront a metaphor that is far more alive in its associations, far more ambiguous, and more crucial --> both an evocation of alienation and a recognition of communality --tonally--> composed of *equal portions of sorrow and wonder* --> forcing us *to remain in the position of interpreter* of something that is perpetually open =/= direct statement


Blake (and Attar?) wouldn't be the great poet he is if he could allow his bloom to be entirely symbol
--> a bloom attached to the speaker, a memeber of Lord Death's troops, an assistant to the disruptive powers of the night
=/= transcendence

crucible بوته اهنگرى, this nere-archaic word with its connotations of flame and molten metal, magical heat and transformation


sunflower: the cry of the determined survivor**

(differently depicted) sunflower gain power from resisting the flower's conventional associations

the poetic =/= reinscribing the already known

“it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” (George Eliot > Doty) ♥



description = giving us the world + the inner life of the witness

evoking texture of experience --> beauty = accuracy

“whatever ‘what is’ is is what i want.” tosif توصیف
(Galway Kinnel)


“the deeds and sufferings of light.” -Goethe @Foad

into the reader's internal eye

Foad's paintings: ...two textures have now been added to the color, and in “rough” there is even a suggestion of place--it doesn't sound domestic, or urban--and of age


(coming close to an) impossible, longed-for accomplishment


the art of description = *the art of perception* }--> what do you require to say what you see?

to be better at description, we have to work at attentiveness

#training / do contour drawing just with your eyes


your erotic inflects and charges is your way of interacting with the world
...you basically just make love to the whole world
...and all the stories you tell yourself about your encounter with the cake


[*]economy =/= it is too much, excess
no one would want Proust to have less to say
fulsome discourse works only when perception itself is the subject --> Proust's novel is a huge inquiry into the nature of consciousness : a magnificently nuanced evocation of what it is to see and sense --> which is usually *too much*


here is one of those stories everyone swears is true,...


(an appetizer called) “smoked language”

the absolute centrality of figurative speech

(Susan Morrow:) how the scuttle of crab claws on sand influenced the hieroglyph for “writing”

we breathe metaphor, swim in metaphor, traffic in metaphor

(becoming poet = becoming the) handler of the figurative speech : employing language's tendency to connect like and disparate things to the richest possible effects
(in talk:) figurative is at its most sophisticated: [...]