Logically Unimaginable, Yours Truly

I began this blog as a way to jump-start my dissertation proposal.  I was frozen up in fear and worry and the fecundity of my mind seemed a cacaphony.  I thought--true to my methodological commitments--"I'll use some photos to both capture some ideas that are mutli-layered and in danger of being lost AND to puctuate and catalyze the writing I need to do."  It has worked.  My advisor on psychoanalytic theory--Mari Ruti--shared a CRUICAL tidbit on on to survive the amputational process that is writing:  Put the deferred ideas elsewhere and let them be your next books.  That, too, has worked.

Hence Imaginary Logic.  I named this blog because I was buried deep in discerning my philosophical influences.   The name simply came to me.  As a poet, I know that little "ka-chnk" when some phrase or thought finds its momentary home. So sweet. So good.  I know to keep it simple and move it on in with as little fuss as possible.  I tend to mess with these later, after I live into them.  I did "mess" with this name only in researching it... and I found two incredible facts when I conducted a quick search on the name.  First--there's a lovely poet named Rodney Jones who wrote an award nominated chapbook by this name.  Here's from a review from Poets.org:
"The Art of Heaven" opens with a parody of Dante and a down-home, twisted humor that Jones’s readers have come to rely on: "In the middle of my life I came to a dark wood, / the smell of barbecue, kids running in the yards. / Not deep depression. This nice hell of suburbs. / Speed bumps. The way things aren’t quite paradise."
Frighteningly close to my own poetry style, I might presumingly say. 

Poignantly:  I cannot be sure this is the guy.

And then an even more spooky discovery, given that I can trace familiar roots spiraling rather close to Eastern Europe: A small treatise praising the prescience one "Nicolai Alexandrovich Vasiliev (Russian: Николай Александрович Васильев), also Vasil'ev, Vassilieff, Wassilieff (11 July [O.S. 29 June] 1880–1940) was a Russian logician, philosopher, psychologist, poet, the forerunner of paraconsistent and multi-valued logics."  (Wikipedia)  The paper is by Valentine A. Bazhanov and basically states that this gentleman was painfully far ahead of his time, anticipating the the post-modern understanding that what can be defined is temporary in definition and--to put it over-simply--open in odd and important ways. Logic folds back on and into itself.  These notions dovetailed rather neatly with my Wittgenstein obsession, and carried me beyond it, as well.  Ah bliss! 

All of this is to say--one cannot orchestrate such "accidents"-- such coincidences.  I am humbled and a little baffled and a lot inspired.  I shall take this all further, I promise.  Buy the book, okay? 

Vigna-caracalla-bean vine

But, for now, I see why my blog statistics show a strange pattern of site visits from Russia.  I'm sure my visitors are disappointed; this is my notepad, not my thesis.  But, dear ones, stay tuned.  I shall give tribute where tribute is due.  Who's to say that lines of thought don't ride our DNA?  I shall endeavor to be one small blossoming on the forgotten genius Vasiliev's vine.  Thank you weird universe, for my Imaginary Logic.  Better than logic alone, this poetry of logic, this synaptic leap across tradition allows the small petals of synchronities of idea and insight to unfold from an old, much abused and mysterious calyx. 

Bite and Suck

I once got to interview Deborah Britzman...yes of  Practice makes Practice but really, in that moment at Bergamo, she was of Novel Education.  Like any good analysis, I walked away with two distinct koans to beacon me through the rough waters of trying to write my prospectus, proposal and research. One was an aside...or maybe a culmination of a long and vastly erudite exploration of a fine point of Freud's.  (The only other time I've been so in awe and in over my head was when I met Borges and he recited his poetry from memory.  But I digress. Analysts may now smile wryly.)  First this "aside" was "I worry about torture."  I will write more about that later. But yes, I worry nearly obsessively about it.  It is my chief concern, oddly enough.  But when you consider that I did indeed have a teacher that required students to stand in corners holding stacks of encyclopedias, this may not be so surprising.  But yes, I worry about torture; I think it is, in fact, our central concern in living together.  And genociede, too while we're at it.  And fascist regimes that disappear people.  These were the terrors of my maturing years and they remain the hauntings that drive my efforts.  I simply concluded that the best attempt at redress was to address the beginnings.  Sometimes, now, I am in despair.  I feel trapped in a system that neatly herds us all, critics included, towards the truck, the train car, the uniform.  I think Deborah was musing upon that, maybe.  How sneaky the disaster is, how torture sidles in on little token economy feet.

The other thing she said that stayed with me was "bite and suck, bite and suck"...chuckling at the universal dialectic of the love and antagonism tango that operates through virtually all human interaction.  THIS phrase has been popping to my mind's surface like a cork in a washtub, a bobber where the fish got away.  I nursed three babies so I'm acquainted with the bite and the suck and one thing that occurs to me is the varieties of both that a nursing mother experiences.  Most of us can relish and say "awwwww" around the sweet sucking notion.  It's the bite we like to avoid considering.  But, as an early childhood person, I know that the bite cannot be avoided.  Babies bite.  And they do it for an amazing array of reasons in an amazing array of ways.  Biting is the bane of a Nursery School director's life, I can tell you. 

But I'll speak as the mother, here. I'll put my well-nursed breast on the line, so to speak.  Biting in that nursing situation has been oversimplified, I think, yes, even by the psychoanalytic folks. I need to read up more BUT I think that to portray that bite as only antagonism, of the wrestling aversion to utter dependence and the feasone growl of "why am I here?!"....it leaves out another bite that most nursing mothers know quite well.  First, on the classic bite--oh yes, ALWAYS happens--at least once.  Usually, only once or maybe twice and boy howdy, the wearer of the breast's reaction pretty well ensures that particular bite doesn't happen again.  It's a moment, for sure.  And bears much consideration and decontructing.  BUT

There's another bite and it's the one that the more mature nurser masters--it's the pulling bite that doesn't QUITE become chomp but is instead is a press for "MORE."  It's what that classic kitten paw dance does--it's a fierce and effective effort to get MORE, c'mon MORE milk to flow.  Most mothers do not pull away from this one.  First of all, it usually arrives gradually so we build a tolerance. Secondly, some part of us knows what's going on, that our nurser is coaxing our body to step it up, send out a call  for more, yet again more--both this time and from here on out, because that's how the system works. 

This bite, too, is in the bite and suck only it's not the same bite as the other bite.  It is still painful, let me tell you, but it is not the chomp of "eat you up" or the roar of "what are you that I must have you always?!"  It is the mmmmmmmmMMMMMMMOOOOOOORE bite....I don't think bite is the right word; that word has too much chop to it.  Maybe "gnnnnuck" for gnaw and suck. 

But my point is that there is this third way.  There's another step in the tango--it's not just bite and suck--there's a blend in there that 's made of pure pragmatic effort, yes with a strain of "me--I want" but tempered with continued connection and sustained enjoyment.  It's a hybrid--a embracing beast.  There are implications here, I think, for the roots of sublimation.  For the beginnings of communication beyond and through communion.

Just watch the teeth, dear one, watch the teeth. 

Grief in the Nursery

I do beleive that all education, in the tradition of currare, is elegaic.  It is an always "becoming" and so must mourn, in a somewhat (but not entirely) Derridean sense, the past, the present, certainly, knowlege and the hopeful space of the ineffable.  But there is a different chapter I must write someday soon and it is that of the Grief of education.  In particular, the grief of early childhood care and education.  The last of the childhood territories to be colonized (with infancy's raw, uterine tissue being cognitized and marketed even in the moment)--it is worthy of a ululation, a Ginsbergian HOWL. Early Childhood teachers are nearly mad with the denial of this greif but they are a strong set and persevere like every colonized first peoples--Fanon will explain, I need not.  Like a woman in labor, they cannot interrupt their work because it will kill them to do so.  (Those of us who have stepped back from the work feel as if we might be dying, indeed.  But we are hoping to shift to midwife and doula.) 

The commodification of babies represent a trespass akin to rape.  It is perhaps no coincidence that, as I attempt to write my own step toward midwifery, I must remember anew, understand with a compassion I had not allowed before, my own rape as a young woman.  Several, in fact. At some level this is the truth I can speak to my own pyschic journey and to the colonization of the psychic space of early childhood:  Rape is rape. I suspect the hysteria 20+ years ago around molestation and abuse in day cares foretold our psychic knowledge--we knew our babies were being abused; we just didn't want to acknowledge that we were complicit. Violation of our being at this unique level--violating our youngest in the name of material avarice and fear--is akin to the much-discussed rape of the environment (no mistake in that conflation). Strong feminist voices from Mary Daly, to Carolyn Merchant to Susan Griffen to Riane Eisler have consistently pointed out the link between the oppression of the "feminine" and the despoiling of our planet. A deep, raw wound exists here--and the pledge to further enshrine this violation by "husbanding, stewarding" or any of the other euphemisms for consolidating and attemping to bury the sin only make this relationship all the more clear. 

This goes further to what Wittgenstein was asking for, I think, when he tried to point to the limits of language: We can only language the moment and to language beyond that, to totalize it into a system of surety, betrays the possible, forecloses the open hope of time, embodiment, instantiation ever becoming.  Of course, we must speak into the moment, but to demand the baby utter Truth is to lock our very being into a hubris that will betray our possibilites.  Colonizing the newly born forecloses upon life-force.  We have rooted through our psychic spaces and found the last, now--the womb. And the law is closing swiftly upon it.  Good luck, poor fools.  This is where we must, as W says, become silent.  To babble here is fruitless--in all meanings of the word. 

Sonneting about un-sonneting...so to speak; composing decomposition



Art and photo by Katie Scott



My Small Envy of the Russet Leaf

The sweet tidal tongue of sap recedes

and this emanation—oak’s slow poetry—

gentles with a last bright flare of

dénouement, then sighs, secedes.

Leaf does not haul fleshy knots of artery

to dirt, requires little of rot’s muscle to exhume

its double-helixed hive.  Like shakuhachi

to Shostakovich, thin leaf to thick human.

 Yet, despite and within strange différance

 silence unspools relation—listener-musician,

 musician-listener:  in the end,

 breath, no breath,  coda , no coda,

undoes the lie of revelation we call life

from the indifferent benevolence of light.

The Dream's Navel

I'm ecstatic at finding this moment of no-can-do in Freud: The dream's navel.  The place where there is such a confluence of imagery and idea that sorting through it, finding the analytic key, is stymied.  Is it a verge on the ineffable?  The immanent?  Most writers on this point say he was marking a limit on his own ability in a given analysis, noting that some dream mysteries need time to ripen into meaning.  Either way, this is a happy find for me.  Especially as my mate moves into this new phase of drawing these lovely singular visions of flower/plant unfurling.  He tends to depict that place the blossom began--the navel of the blossom?  It's beautiful, the vibrations of the plant's being and the air around it and the apprehension of our gaze falling upon it like light but then not like light.....The navel of the dream.  Dave once asked me, not in quite so specific terms, when/how my approach stopped being "navel-gazing" and my answer was a story.  I don't remember the story!  But I remember that all I could do in that moment was illustrate the bridge between self-understanding and understanding itself. 

Martha My Dear

I am having a very troubled time shifting today, Thanksgiving morning, into to baking pies for the family gathering. I'm in the middle of dissertation formation and I am I not feeling friendly towards my kitchen.  One might say I am actually enraged. I fear these are going to be some angry apple pies.  The Buddhist in me is aghast. I should be feeling like I'm getting off easy as this is the first T-day in several years I haven't been the hostess.  Three years ago, I had my whole family PLUS my office room mate from grad school and our newest grad colleague from Cameroon and his three children.  It was a fun, food-filled, funny day.  (The moment Michael from Cameroon pulled in and my son shouted "he's got kids in his car!" was a moment of hilarious scramble as we unearthed the card table, adding 3 more seats.)

Right now, despite my love of pie and the usual relative ease with which I cook-- finding joy in the smellsm textures and tastes of the foods, extemporizing with spice or form, anticipating delight of my loved ones--despite all that, I could give a flying...well you know.

I feel like Martha Stewart might have felt upon being booked into prison.  I barely tracked that whole drama but have always felt pretty certain that she got gigged simply because she was a woman who dared to become a mogul.  Do you think it maybe made a difference that she snuck into mogul-dom on little domestic design feet?  I do.  How dare she build an empire by marketing the sacred sphere of the domestic.  We can handle Ikea building it's Nordic base upon domestic furniture, we can even handle that crazy Julia Child bringing the hearth and it's crockery into the public and the marketplace (though, I daresay, she didn't quite make it to mogul status).  But Martha?  My God!  She took all the sweet little flourishes of decor, problem-solving, flower-arrangement, holiday cooking and patio play and she did them better and then make bunches of money through being saavy, driven and, I guess, a bit sloppy in sharpshooting the marketplace.  Or was she just an easy target for some other sharp-shooter?  Who gained ascendance while Martha sat behind bars? 

Vermeer's version

I can't help but think, given all the egregious sins of the many other moguls with penises out there, that there was some jealous spirit gnawing away at the process that busted Martha.  Maybe it was just that she had that new testament name.  Martha was the one, after all, in the Jesus story, that was the steady homemaking sort, obeying the dictates of of time and place, preparing the food for the illustrious visitor and his coterie.  And she is a bit cranky with Mary when she goes to sit in on the teaching.  When Martha heads out to fetch Mary back to the kitchen where she belongs, Jesus says ⁴¹ “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, ⁴² but few things are needed—or indeed only one.^[a] Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” (NIV, Luke 10:38-42)  


My mother the feminist theologian used to teach on this one.  The rooms would be full of "Martha"s (sometimes quite literally) and, after years of keeping both the church dinner and the church accounts balanced, they not just a little perplexed in their hearts by Jesus' admonition.  Mom had both good news and bad news for them.  She would gently point out that she thought that maybe Jesus had a point--if we pass up the chance for a profound moment because the kitchen needs to be swept, we might have our priorities skewed.  Also, we might be worrying about minutiae while the very the mountains are moving.  Then again, it was that same Jesus who fed thousands, who admonished his followers to "give the coats off [their] backs."  



Was it a bunch of misguided Marys bringing down the house of Martha? That was one weird blogger's accusation--that feminists brought her down. (1)

I can't believe, especially now as the ridiculous wrongs of the marketplace and their moguls are made so clear in the glare of the OWS objections, that she actually served time.  



We sure did put her in her place, no? Did "someone" see her contaminating our domestic interior by bringing with capitalist--not initiative, which can be downright cute, as long as it stays small--but with capitalist success, success on the guy's terms in the guys' world using the girls' world and the girls' dollars. (2)  I think someone, and I (along with Ms. magazine)  really suspect a male, wanted to see this picture:

So here--the apples are unpeeled and the pumpkin still in cans--have a lil' piece of psychoanalytic pie, instead.  






(1) To redress that absurd and badly argued point check out this wonderful examination (pre-arrest, I believe) of the positioning of Madonna and Martha. Cool feminist analysis that concludes "an examination of Stewart's performance of domesticated femininity reveals that she is readily appropriated by queer cultures, who welcome her as an Other figure who reinvents rigidly defined social institutions, such as the 'family' and particular holiday occasions."   (http://www.thirdspace.ca/journal/article/viewArticle/thrift/112)

(2) (To get a complete--and I mean complete--picture of how the domestic and public spheres are not only fluid but became defined as such, check out a The Secret History of Domesticity by Michael McKeon). 

 

Min(e)(d)

(Photo by Nadia Rej)

As a poet, I sometimes am too ambiguous. It is hard to hold a thought in "solution"--not crytallized into lock-down yet present enough to be apprehended. Indeed, today's thought is too simplified by the image. And yet. If my womb cannot be "mine"--and yes, it is and isn't in a Buddhist sense--then what hope have we of offering any freedoms to the rest of our bodie? The fear of the fascist mommy has so overwhelmed some aspect of our community politic that we fiddle with pizza while the artic burns. How much of Education is a thinly veiled attempt to wrest one final managerial muscle from the mommy? Pestalozzi idealized the mother (and needed her badly to manage his farm) and Froebel recruited her to tend his gardens.  

It is the invisible hand outside of the picture frame that is the fascist. The one that holds the knife, the pill, the tract, the photo of the embryo, the flimsily drafted law, that points the finger but refuses to lift it. Fascism begins in how we frame the womb, how we think it.