started reading Susan McCabe's book Cinematic Modernism at the library. About HD and her connection with cinema, how cinema affected her poetics, etc. Just from the introduction are some cool quotes:
"Enter Cinema. It made visible a body, never visible before -- one that is at once whole and in pieces."
"Cinematic bodies haunt, permeate, fragment and are fragmented by representation."
"Silent film's status as a form of hieroglyphics promised that an Esperanto or universal language might be attained."
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
My list of Visions
Mother Goose, legs hanging from midair (SF) 2013
Anubis (Oakland)
Einstein
Flashback static fan movement (SF)
glowing(SF)
Greek Athlete(SF)
Lawn chair figure at AWP (A)
shadow figure on stairs(SF)
vision of many faces in the trees (SF)
god in waiting area (SF)
rose hovering above me (SF)
bull/owl(SF)
shadow figure walking away (H)
St Francis (SF)
Mandala (H)
Angel in shorts on freeway(H)
Red snowflake (Switzerland)
Cowboy(H)
Harlem Flapper(H)
ET(H)
Granddaddy(H)
Anubis (Oakland)
Einstein
Flashback static fan movement (SF)
glowing(SF)
Greek Athlete(SF)
Lawn chair figure at AWP (A)
shadow figure on stairs(SF)
vision of many faces in the trees (SF)
god in waiting area (SF)
rose hovering above me (SF)
bull/owl(SF)
shadow figure walking away (H)
St Francis (SF)
Mandala (H)
Angel in shorts on freeway(H)
Red snowflake (Switzerland)
Cowboy(H)
Harlem Flapper(H)
ET(H)
Granddaddy(H)
glow vision
Had a really strange experience in yoga, because of this weird back injury I have been laying off of yoga mostly, and am just getting back into it. For bliss replacement, I have been trying to meditate more. In class last night, we were doing a open-eyed meditation in the dark, and my right knee started glowing orange, and then everything around me was glowing, everything in the periphery at least, it really was freaking me out. Vision energy is ascending, I guess. But no actual vision, except for the glowing...
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Part III of Eurydice by H.D.
III
Saffron from the fringe of the earth,
wild saffron that has bent
over the sharp edge of earth,
all the flowers that cut through the earth,
all, all the flowers are lost;
everything is lost,
everything is crossed with black,
black upon black
and worse than black,
this colourless light.
Saffron from the fringe of the earth,
wild saffron that has bent
over the sharp edge of earth,
all the flowers that cut through the earth,
all, all the flowers are lost;
everything is lost,
everything is crossed with black,
black upon black
and worse than black,
this colourless light.
H.D.'s Vision at Corfu
Quoted from Megan Simpson's Poetic Epistemologies, page 67:
"H.D.'s account of her extraordinary vision of picture-writing appearing (as if projected from her own consciousness) on a hotel wall at Corfu in 1920, an account written 20 years later in "Writing on the Wall," offers another example of how the value of the sign, for H.D., lies in its very indeterminacy. Rather than seeking definitive meanings or translations of the signs as Freud had during H.D.'s analysis with him in 1933, H.D. emphasizes the multiplicity of available readings of the images and the impossibility of fixing on any one final meaning. Her comments about two of the six hieroglyphlike images that appeared in succession on the wall are particularly telling. About the third image to form, a circle with three lines supporting its base, she writes, "The tripod, we know, was the symbol of prophecy, prophetic utterance that of occult or hidden knowledge; the Priestess or Pythoness of Delphi sat on the tripod while she pronounced her verse couplets, the famous Delphic utterances when it was said could be read two ways" (Tribute 51). Significantly, H.D. interprets this image as the sign of indeterminacy itself, referring not to an external signified, but to another process of signification in which rereading is similarly problematized — the Delphic oracles. The fifth image, which H.D. names Nike, "is a moving-picture and fortunately she moves swiftly" (Tribute 55); this physical movement of the material signifier H.D. takes to be a symbolic manifestation of the unfixability of signs in general. And this may be why she attaches a special significance to this figure as representing signification itself, even claiming it as her own personal signifier-as-signifier: "Nike, Victory seemed to be the clue, seemed to by my own especial sign or part of my hieroglyph" (Tribute 56).
"H.D.'s account of her extraordinary vision of picture-writing appearing (as if projected from her own consciousness) on a hotel wall at Corfu in 1920, an account written 20 years later in "Writing on the Wall," offers another example of how the value of the sign, for H.D., lies in its very indeterminacy. Rather than seeking definitive meanings or translations of the signs as Freud had during H.D.'s analysis with him in 1933, H.D. emphasizes the multiplicity of available readings of the images and the impossibility of fixing on any one final meaning. Her comments about two of the six hieroglyphlike images that appeared in succession on the wall are particularly telling. About the third image to form, a circle with three lines supporting its base, she writes, "The tripod, we know, was the symbol of prophecy, prophetic utterance that of occult or hidden knowledge; the Priestess or Pythoness of Delphi sat on the tripod while she pronounced her verse couplets, the famous Delphic utterances when it was said could be read two ways" (Tribute 51). Significantly, H.D. interprets this image as the sign of indeterminacy itself, referring not to an external signified, but to another process of signification in which rereading is similarly problematized — the Delphic oracles. The fifth image, which H.D. names Nike, "is a moving-picture and fortunately she moves swiftly" (Tribute 55); this physical movement of the material signifier H.D. takes to be a symbolic manifestation of the unfixability of signs in general. And this may be why she attaches a special significance to this figure as representing signification itself, even claiming it as her own personal signifier-as-signifier: "Nike, Victory seemed to be the clue, seemed to by my own especial sign or part of my hieroglyph" (Tribute 56).
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