the violence of reality/ clichés

When talking about the violence of paint it's nothing to do with the violence of war. It's to do with an attempt to remakte the violence of reality itself . . . and the violence also of the suggestions within the image itself which can only be conveyed through paint. When I look at you across the table I don't only see you, I see a whole emanation which also has to do with personality and everything else . . . the living quality . . . all the pulsations of a person . . . the energy within the appearance. . . . And to put that over in a painting means that it would appear violent in print. We nearly always live through screens—a screened existence. And I sometimes think when people say my work is violent that from time to time I have been able to clear away one or two of the screens. [Francis Bacon in gesprek met David Sylvester]

Bacon says we live through screens. What are these screens? They are part of our normal way of looking at the world, or rather our normal way of seeing the world without looking at it, for Bacon's claim is that a real seer who looked at the world would notice it to be fairly violent—not violent as narrative surface but somehow violently composed underneath the surface, having violence as its essense. No one has ever seen a black hole yet scientists feel confident they can locate its essense in the gravitational collapse of a star—this massive violence, this something which is also, spectacularly, nothing.

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Uit ‘Variations on the Right to Remain Silent’, Float; Anne Carson.

candor/ anne carson

Could 1

If you are not the free person you want to be, you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name.

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Uit ‘Candor’, Float; Anne Carson.

variations on the right to remain silent/ clichés

Sinds de verkiezing van Trump denk ik veel na over identiteit, en de laatste dagen in het bijzonder over de invloed van stereotypes/ clichés op identiteit. Vooral het idee dat we een conclusies kunnen trekken over identiteit naar aanleiding van wat we (hebben ge)zien, of niet gezegd kunnen krijgen, steekt me. En het ongeloof en wantrouwen ten opzichte van onbegrijpelijke taal (poëzie/ zie hieronder). Toevallig vind ik in het essay ‘Variations on the right to remain silent’ van Anne Carson (opgenomen in haar nieuwste publicatie Float) iets dat me verder helpt.

Carson schrijft in het essay o.a. over Jeanne D'Arcs proces, over de wens van haar berechters om duidelijkheid te krijgen over de herkomst van de stemmen die ze hoorde, over Jeanne's weigering in clichés te vervallen:

Joan [of Arc] despised the line of inquiry and blocked it as long as she could. It seems that, for her, the voices had no story. They were an experienced fact so large and real it had solidified in her as a sort of sensed abstraction—what Virginia Woolf once called "that very jar on the nerves before it has been made anything." Joan wanted to convey the jar on the nerves without translating it into theological cliché. It is her rage against cliché that draws me to her. A genius is in her rage. We all feel this rage at some level, at some time. The genius answer to it is catastrophe.

I say catastrophe is an answer because I believe cliché is a question. We resort to cliché because it's easier than trying to make up something new. Implicit in it is the question, Don't we already know what we think about this? Don't we have a formula we use for this?

Jeanne D'Arc blijft, vooral in het begin van haar proces, dingen zeggen die niet herleid kunnen worden:

And one day when the judges were pressing for her to define the voices as singular or plural, she most wonderfully said (as a sort of summary of the problem): 

The light comes in the name of the voice.

“The light comes in the name of the voice” is a sentence that stops itself. Its components are simple yet it stays foreign, we cannot own it.