Writing Holy Smokes

Articulate {"to flay the beast at the joints
with minimum of blood and gristle")

Representation Representing Counts More

than  What’s  Represented.

Shadows fly north,  crossing  over  trees  in the early
 afternoon sunlight;  not the crows themselves —high
over Jensen—but shapes passing over the cars in the
lot below.

IT’s got to be about something, some deal or other, but

that's not what it’s really about: it’s really about  the

process of being  able to be  about something: some deal

or other. The media, in  this case, is the message —not

the overt, ostensible apparent message, which of course

naturally dominates discourse: the appearances,  right?
as distinct from …what? higher reality?  Or the deeper
grammar &  ecologic of conversation?  How do we manage
to maintain the distinction between the superficialities
and the process that generates them? 

Assuming we want to.

                       Writing.  Holy smokes!

Don’t let what-I’m-saying eclipse THAT I’M SAYING for
 crying  out loud: saying “saying” is what I’m saying, or
(amounting to the same thing)  writing about writing.
Thinking on the one hand about  thinking, and then on
the other hand: thinking about this and that and the other.
Do the math: you can tell which  is “primary”—
which secondary and so forth.

“No matter how sophisticated we may be as to the constructed

and arbitrary character of our practices, including practices of

representation, our  practice of practices is one of actively

forgetting such mischief each time we open  our mouths

to ask for something or make a  statement….To witness

mimesis, to marvel at its wonder or fume  at its duplicity,

is to  sentient-ly…register its profound influence on

everyday  practices of representation.”   (Taussig)

Description is “better” than that which is described.

Composition itself: more significant than what’s

 composed. And the same with “seeing” and “saying”

—the participial version indicates a value “higher”

than what the nouns  channel: “seen” and  “said,”  

mere tokens of the process itself.  Carriers.

Conversation, likewise, outweighs (so to speak)
both conversants  and  the stuff talked about
(what we call subject matter,  object matter,
topics: the whiners of our dys-content.)