To begin at the begging, the beginning, as one does. Isn't this (and there are tomes upon tomes on this to be sure) just an arbitrary 'beginning', pulled out of 'time' that still had a still-before, and a still-before that. But we don't want to talk about the still-before, not yet, other than to say that one wonders if there isn't some mistaking 'time' for something 'real' here and thinking about time [as the time one lives, I made coffee before I spilt it on my computer, before I was a commuter, after the hunt for the keys, etc...] not as the odd infinite thing it is, like L'niz refuting the 'absurdity' of the infinitesimal by say that there is no "last half" {against those who would argue that if you keep cutting a line in half you MUST get to a segment that is the 'last' (they had forgotten Zeno's paradox), but have surely also forgotten what infinity 'means'}.
And the 'real' is what we are going to talk (retalk), recloak, culling a part of (some parts of) discussion from many years ago. Not because it was 'first' AKA the 'real' beginning, but because it lagged, like a lame wildebeest or gnu. The lagging gnu, the tardy then, is this a beginning.
[cert, one could say that "No, you have selected out of the archive of available streams of air and pictograms for streams of air a thing, which you claim beginning", you are just being as De'da when he says (knowing nothing of 'ghosting'
here, too newly) that he is a ghost of himself, having been asked to play himself in "Ghost Dance" (see clip below) just playing it a little 'false' for convenience and effect]
The 'real' beginning would beg proof. The lagging new need not be the most lagging, it is just what was successfully captured, stopped, eaten (consumed). The lagging new recurs as a support. Not 'the' support, just 'a' support. There is (too?
what the hell are you doing here) much emphasis on beginnings it seems more so from a point of consumability (
digestibility) and
technique, or really what is always the pedagogical vulgar 'shop talk' of 'insiders', ie. 'savages' in their 'tribe'.
Not that this pair(ing - they are not just this way, saying so made them 'be' together - ) is really all that separable. The pedagogy is constructed someway/how (and all the very important questions and impotent responses lie lying here) in a/some 'relation' {in the strong sense, the only real sense comes from back [begins?] here by what this is} to digestibility, sometimes mistakenly referred to as taste. But this is why every baked good made for sale, unless it is 'wrong' ('false') is too sweet. There is a consensus among practitioners of baking goods that these are the correct tastes {one wonders how these proportions and techniques and their corresponding 'tastes' (if that were attainable, communicable, communicate-able) have changed over 'time' [really, too entirely 'provable' to be believed}, this is not absolute, cert. The beauty of Asian pastry being often partly the other flavors that are allowed to intermingle, free of the too-sweet, too-creamy, too-rich,
tout suite.
But taste. So we can begin to hook. To addict. To infect. The virology of an art. And to sell, to hook. Is the consensus of beginnings enough to engender their use in the future? Does this stand for 'realism'? or 'humanism'? These are the issues on the
mindpage of
Kathy Acker at the beginning of the beginning of the journal
narrativity.
Ok, so consensus isn't on the page/mind. But narrative and realism are. It tells us a story which she claims isn't about anything, and isn't real(ism). But before that, almost at the beginning there is:
"So understand this is simple and it's the beginning of something. You know,
it's totally open rather than anything else."
But first, is this what beginning do? Do they open as doors/window/chest cavities? Or are they a pointing-trying-to-avoid-the-pointing-its-doing? Or... well it couldn't just be 'anything' right? But the two issues at this hand, then, were, apparently, Identity, and Millennialism (too put in a word, really it's the same neurotic bullshit everyone's always been on).
But so the page recounts a story, some facts, a dream. Then the claims on this narrative's lack, then some quotes from others, a form of proof(?) about the nature of 'realism'. Realism reduced real reality to the fictive reality of controllable efficiently caused space/time/things, and realism {both quotes mention 19th c. ladadada...} places things outside of the control of the characters. (Which is glossed there as "
dehumanizing" which comes up a number of times, a little questionable but we'll pass over that for now.) There is the promise also, in a quote of Julio Cotesar (or Cortasar) about, about this realism being superseded (or attempted anyhow) in the spots where things fall outside the realm of the rule of (natural) law[s].
And then a shift, onto (logically) reality and chaos. Some stretching (play, as we will find out later) gives silences and slippages (to misplace words "
this is all postmodernist shit" [circa 1993 San Fran, mind one]) and then a passing ref to Melville and reality is the slipping the interstices of reality and what is that if not chaos.
Then a structuralist(istic) attempt to codify the three times of narrative, well novel now, the subject keeps shifting... And then we finish with more laws. The phallocentric writer writes reality as it should be and his voice is the truth... But we need play, and we need to build things that... well:
The desire to play, to make literary structures which play into and in unknown
or unknowable realms, those of chance and death and the lack of language,
is the desire to live in a world that is open and dangerous, that is limitless.
To play, then, both in structure and in content, is to desire to live in wonder.
The most sensible thing in the whole piece (I am really trying - and failing, I know - to suspend critique and critical method here, perhaps we'll touch on why...). Except for the unknown and unknowable. As a desire... No, as categories (hence known) of desire (as ochered, as already not the realm of desire, but if the dream realm given earlier here is taken seriously in its 'structure and content' then the realm of dream and most likely desire would be that of filmic ('hollywood'; or at least hi-budget) representation {which I'm still pretty sure isn't where ghosts are, but....]) that would be possible. But the unknown of a narrative structure is still a narrative structure. To play something edible/digestible, sayable/teachable/writable, would be play
with all the trappings of realism, and it "centrism" and tracings of forces whose math works. Because in all of that lies the communicability of togethering by any means. So that pages seeks to distance the 'telling-how-it-is' of the 'told' and this page seeks to telling telling in its proximity to told and being told and the order of things that has inertia. And not to say that all these rules and norms are there and solid, like the story of the infinitesimal at the <up there> it is just to say that these rules and norms forget that they are just pedagogy of writing, that the reality of writing sits in a place very close to but not traced by what we call its effects and causes. Maybe this is what that page was saying. We haven't said anything about identity either.
