The paragraph break is a pivot. A rip in the text that can be mended with any new thread of thought. The miracle of white space stitching together the otherwise unconnected: skipping forward, looping back.
Short paragraphs, like short sentences, demand more from a writer than the long ones. Because every pivot is a turn at which the reader might turn away.
Some things I have been intending to write about for so long that that when I finally sit down to write I no longer have any interest in writing them. So it is with the rhetorical figure of ‘not yet . . . no longer’ which I found in Agamben a few years ago and which then struck me as the most perfect decsription of the language of poetic criticism which is not yet unequivocal but no longer music. Which goes to show that even the seed that takes a long time to germinate can be uprooted with a single tug.
A few hours after emphasising the work of art, I came across Mieke Bal doing the same thing, and for the same purpose. Much as it is cheering to discover in my writing something that a writer I admire has written before me, it is also a little bit annoying to feel the pleasure at the turn of phrase torn out of my hands and transformed into yet another citation.
Whether or not one is a romantic can perhaps be fruitfully determined through one’s conception of art.
art = performance Art as something happening in the act of being seen, heard, felt, experienced. I associate this with movements beginning with post-.
art = representation Art as a copy of reality and therefore, pace Plato, being somewhat less real. Classicism.
art = interpretation Art as being incomplete until criticised. Not that criticism completes art, but it continues the work of art. This is romanticism.
A kind of disappointment which I would like to term the banality of the visual and which is experienced when one has read a critical interpretation of an artwork, been completely swept away by this interpretation and then, when faced with the work itself, known that it’s just a picture – say, of a chair.
Firstly, because literature is a “work of words” (Dylan Thomas) and the words on the page of any given version of the work – a manuscript draft or different print editions – will exist in the several different places where those versions are located at once. They are not one artefact.
Secondly, even if we grant that the literary work is not identical with the historical artefacts in which it is dispersed, it is still not clear in which way the work itself is one, and not a multitude of variant versions confusingly labelled with one title. Strictly speaking, a literary work is not one work.
Thirdly, the “work” in the phrase “literary work” is best understood not as a noun but a verb. And since literature is always at work, it is not an artefact completed in the past and hauled into our present, but the continual reshaping of the past into a present. It is not historical but history itself, in a nutshell.
A page of drafting offers a spatial arrangement of words, just like a stage offers a spatial arrangement of properties and actors.
But unlike a stage, which empties out after the rehearsal, the space of a literary draft is one in which a work is captured, stilled, in its movement of translation from the author’s mind and into a form suitable for historical transmission.
There’s no reason why re-reading a book you once loved should be different from re-visiting a city where you once lived. Yet an instrumentalist voice whispers that reading a book I already know is a waste of time in the face of all the books I haven’t read. Not so with travel. I’d gladly give up places I haven’t seen for the pleasure of confirming that things remain even while I’m away.
At some point in my early days of reading I made a rule that if I make it to page 30 then I will finish the rest of the book. This was wiser than I could have understood at the time, as it released me from the obligation to finish dreadful books just because I’d started them. This rule became so ingrained in my reading practice that I still resent the book that first made me break it (D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love).
But now that I am so far gone in my academic career to have essentially forgotten what if feels like to read without obligation it strikes me that very many, if not even most, books loose their excitement after the thirtieth page. Theirs is the pleasure of striking out on a journey as well as the tedium of privatised rail travel and the hour’s wait for a connection on a windy platform at Peterborough.
Since discovering sub-brights, I’ve been struck by the self-evident clarity of the undertone:
In the colour spectrum, the undertone rises from the depths of any given colour to reveal its proximity to another colour.
In language, the undertone sounds the part of communicative speech that is not spoken.
In music, the undertone turns the twinkling of high notes into a fugue.
Thoughts fallen by the wayside 