Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Writing, or Remembering:

from: "A Gesture Through Time" by Elizabeth Block

"Memory is so imperceptible. It is a skeleton of embodied experience gone by -- only to hit in a wailing voice crying for what is without. A tale includes a plot-like tease -- a plot-like disease -- yet its outcome eludes us. Like music. Perhaps this is why we listen to the same song over and over again. We listen, hoping for resolution, but it never comes. Only the event's vibrations and movements -- crooning crooning crooning. We seek those high E's and F's; a chorus feigns a flight from loss. Perpetuates some fantasy -- lets us believe the memory is really a present and living body.

But so much of living now is juggling all these instances of loss as they shuffle and interpret
the now. Where is this split?

If you had a choice between losing your hearing or your sight, which loss would you endure more comfortably? What if, after you lost, you changed your mind, not knowing for sure what life is without."
--p. 36
"The limit of fiction remains its inability to get out of 'the real world' as a reference for the work. Language buckles with psychological bounds and gags. Language is as conceptual as art gets." -- p. 42
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