Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Strange

Walker Percy is unraveling my mind. Every word pulls a fold from my brain and unrolls it into a single length of pink tissue--and nothing more than that--and severs each piece he chooses from the next, divides it, a ruler to measure myself.

Am I naming a thing there? An emotion? What is it?

I have gorged my mind. I am drunken. And I am not sure why any of this works the way it does.

Is there a better way to say any of that? If I speak about it, do I speak anything at all? Or is naming, poetry, sign-giving, symbol-making--conveying the emotion we feel toward it--the only thing that matters? Is that what we are doing, naming our emotions? Our perceptions? Or is speaking about it also sign-giving? What...what is it?

Even p 104: "A devaluation has occurred."

Is that necessary? Is it the unavoidable outcome of modern man? Fallen man? All man? Adam? Redeemed man?

I'm willing to talk on here about this. Comment me. I'm up for a while.

2 comments:

  1. If you are asking whether a devaluation is necessary--I do not think so. But do I think it is unavoidable? Yes. As we are selves entirely unable to define who we are, we do not always value or truly think on semiotics. We do not think how we devalue something just by giving it its sign, and leaving it at that, thinking that its sign somehow explains it. It explains nothing. Instead of devaluating the movement of bees as just being some irregular annoying pattern, Percy seems to suggest that getting caught up in the mystery of a thing in and of itself is something like transcendence. It is art, it is science, it is Heidegger and his chalk and O'Connor and her mystery.

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