What if relationships are the primary ordering principle?
What if the way relationships are ordered
clarify, explain, and instruct us on the way things
stand towards each other?
If connectivities are performatives, then the grammar
of the relationship determines its patterns.
We meet at the edge of the text. These words unfold through the syntax of your absent presence in the writing.
Those of whom I speak are embedded in grammars too. While we are a syntax and lexicon of unique verbal patterns, we are still bound by the rules of a grammar which shapes our relationships.
In her radical pedagogy, the woman who teaches says: "What we must never do:
• Patronise, reduce, laud, ridicule, dismay
• Simplify, bowdlerise, censure, censor
• Wield discourse as spectacle
• Wield discourse as power
• Wield discourse contemptuously"
And, I would add, silence each other.
We silence the other in the ways that she says, we humiliate them, and finally by ignoring them. Ignoring them, we remove their voice.
If we refuse to listen, they cannot speak.
If they speak they will not be heard.
We have created a hole in the grammar of our connection
which divests the speaker we did not want to listen to
of a speaking voice that is heard.
I know, Monsieur: it happened to me. My words formed an uncomfortable anomaly in the grammar of the group. Without an anxiety about the rigors of practice, I was not struggling in the way I was meant to. Given the nature of the self beliefs of the group, I could not be overtly ridiculed; eventually, I was skipped over, ignored. The member who became absent though present. Silence was wielded as a contemptuous power by those who formed an inner circle and who felt there was no other way to deal with me, and carefully, so my diminishing welcome would not be evident to the others. What happened Monsieur? I went into exile.
Brenda, in the context of other recent conversations, I hope you will laugh with me as well as at me if I admit this made me angry, as well as sad. love.
ReplyDeleteThis is probably WHY i don't frequent too many writing site...philosophical grammar is beyond my scope...i opt to follow the Nike commercial axiom--"just do it" when it comes to writng
ReplyDeleteEminemsRevenge, hmmn, I'm constructing the experience according to an idea of 'grammar'... I guess that wasn't clear? I can't think of anyone else who's been talking about blog connections as a 'grammar' of 'relations' - not that I've found, though I'm sure it's there. An old concern - it's in my rhizomatics sidebar too. Discursive fields 'n all that. I'm a philosophical poet, Em, what can I do?
ReplyDeleteGnash, gnash - "just do it" he says, "just do it"... you think I'm being too intellectual, I know you do... "just do it" scratches head... ah, sigh. Thanks for the reality check. *hugs
BoureeMusique wrote in her blog yesterday: "I was the "secretary" of the group so I didn't speak much. Anything I did or could have said would have been overlooked." That's what I am - the speaking secretary.
ReplyDeleteWhat happens when the silenced speak?
Jean, I'm sorry you're angry. xo
Ashes, gosh, that's nice. Love you!
ReplyDeleteI'm struggling with the opening bit to this section. The very first stanza was inspired by some notes on Bateson's 'Steps Towards an Ecology of Mind'; the second tiny stanza on connectivity (a type of reiteration perhaps) and performativities in Judith Butler's 'Bodies That Matter.' These are both 90's books, but they influenced me very much. I've always believed relationship to be central to everything. It wasn't until 3am this morning that I finally saw the 'rules' of relationships as a 'grammar of connections.' Whether it works as an extended metaphor I don't know.
So, Systems Theory, and Linguistics Theory, perhaps, is where I need to look next? I'm sure this stuff is out there -
There is this line from High Fidelity - is it Nick Hornby's book or the movie? I can't quite remember, maybe both, where the narrator says he is arranging his LPs "autobiographically" - "If I want to play, say Blue by Joni Mitchell, I have to remember that I bought it for somebody in the autumn of 1983, but didn't give it to them for personal reasons."
ReplyDeleteThe relationship as that central organizing principle... because we are social animals, because we were given voices so that we might tell stories, because nothing may be more cruel than silencing someone's voice.
There have been some events that inspired this 'silencing,' I suppose, that I'm struggling to come to terms with and one of those ways is writing about it as a pattern of human behaviour and exploring it. My writing perhaps exaggerates the situations that inspired it, fictionalizes them to a certain degree, shifts them into the metaphors and the syntax of the text I'm composing. Meaning, it mustn't be taken personally and too seriously.
ReplyDeleteI've written nearly 4000 words already and am blogging this one through, and not hiding the difficult bits.
Narrator, you're still teaching me how to do this through your own writing, by your own example, with bravery.
Arranging our lives autobiographically - that made me laugh! Thank you, today was a very difficult writing day, as you can imagine. Shadow stuff is never easy. Joni Mitchell certainly brightens up the landscape anytime - in 1983, or now!
On relationships, it is always I/It, or I/Thou, I cannot think of a single instant in my life where I was not in relation to. For me, there is no such thing as truly being alone. The verb is about the relation between the subject and object. There are those who are deists who say God is a Verb, meaning, for me, the holy is the mediating relation itself.
(o)
ReplyDeletemb, sweet, thanks, {{{hugs}}}
ReplyDeleteOh, Narrator, read blah-feme's, “fragments of a manifesto for a radical pedagogy,” Sep 19, 2006 - you'll not just agree with it, but'll enjoy it I suspect.
ReplyDeletethanks for that amazing link,
ReplyDeleteand I do like what twoberry added above,
living life for the joy of unintended consequences...
This is stunning. Some speak from the soul, you are such a one. I am in such a place where the silences do not surface to form words. Your writing here is like nourishment from a Sacred Well.
ReplyDeleteBlessings~
So, Systems Theory, and Linguistics Theory, perhaps, is where I need to look next?
ReplyDeleteSee, for example: http://www.hilgart.org/papers_html/091S196.B07.html
Twoberry, I like that a lot - what we hear as passersby; what a passerby might hear. On our blogs we do 'overhear' each other, don't we, our private writing made public.
ReplyDeleteThank you, as ever, dear Laurieglynn.
:) Narrator - blah-feme's manifesto.
Gerund, oh, what a great name! Now I gotta read that article - no more to be or not to be! What, the end of Hamlet? :-) If the question itself disappears, then what? Yes, yes, I'll read it now...
Thank you for this and for pointing me in the direction of blah-feme.
ReplyDeleteThis resonates with me, and reminds me of Mary Daly's concept of erasure, and of the intro to her autobiography Outercourse: "As a student in a small, working-class catholic high school in Schenectady, New York, I was a voice crying in the wilderness when I declared that I wanted to study philosophy. Even the sensitive and generous Sister who was always encouraging me to write for publication had no way of empathizing with such an outrageous urge. Moreover, the school library had no books on the subject. Yet this Lust of my adolescent mind was such that I spun my own philosophies at home. I have no idea where I picked up that Strange propensity."
ReplyDelete.. i'm confused and a lot of other things too.
ReplyDeleteOh the silencing. As the others say, as I've said often, Brenda, your work and effort to "speak", nay, shout your humanity, humbles me. Beautiful pieces these last few.
ReplyDeleteAnd thanks for giving out the link to blah-fem's blog - an excellent find.
As exile is a psychological state as well as a social state, and a sociological state (often, too, a geographic state), your essay gives me a nice 'feel' for a state that is more intellectualized than owned up to (I do know the feeling of exile, too).
ReplyDeleteIn saying I KNOW EXILE I open myself to all sorts of victim-probing interrogation; therefore, I won't make a point of saying much about said subject.
Call me HYPOCRITE: ok with me.
Ah, I love Bateson. Read Steps to an Ecology of Mind this year, and it still echoes with me daily.
ReplyDeleteLife is complex. Relationships are the integration of a matrix of differentiators.
I think silence is the loudest thing I ever hear. It echoes longer than any words, says more, can be listened to in so many different ways. It is not quiet.
Hugs and love Brenda, an abundance of both.
Sx