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Species of Magnets in my house.


Thursday, May 4, 2017

 

“Every word was once an animal.”

 -Ralph Waldo Emerson 

 

Scan-51_p50 Scan1_950

figure 1                                                        figure 2

 

 

Argument

In his 1974 essay Espèces d’Espaces (Species of Space) Georges Perec [x] states the following:

‘To live is to pass from one space to the other, while doing your very best not to bump yourself.’ (Espèces d’Espace, Georges Perec, p. 6)

 

Tine Melzer [x] in her 2016 essay (hand-out) subsequently notes that words are ‘magnets’:

A word has two ends and each awaits ties with another word.

Furthermore that the poetic ‘charge’ of several words together is based on such bonds:

When words meet up, they generate a field of tension, they go together!

In his 1958 book La Poétique de l’Espace (The Poetics of Space), Gaston Bachelard [x] points out that our whole perception of the world we inhabit based is upon our first encounters with the first universe of mankind: the house, the spaces we inhabit. He construct his argument by using the tactic of ‘Poetic Phenomenology’, which is to say, a philosophy built up while reading the poets.

Texts are a constellation of words, the same logic applies so to speak. Texts also have a magnetic effect. A late, albeit, useful discovery. They meet up as well, go together, and charge the field with the same sort of tension. And it this very tension that leads met to the following conclusion.

Something happens when we enter a room or when a work of poetry gently leans upon us. Something, to removed to mention, but there non the less. It leaves us tantalized. This is what we could call ‘the oneiric effect’. The tension, the magnetism has a familiar sound. It is in fact a logical extension of things I have referred to previously. Shortly put, I conclude: a word is a room and a room is a word.

Now what are the implications of such a statement? To illustrate further, this means that magnetism of words and text are played out on an even more poetic and fundamental level, for the visual has to be resolved and is dissolved by words and vice a versa. The visual and the language are (and become) then, in term, the concepts, notions, names and words we call upon to name our interior spaces, our inner houses, the room’s of our own.

This tension can even lead from time to time to vibration, think of Kandinsky’s ‘Seelische Vibration’, Think of a Paul Klee picture, think of the last time you drew a straight line, out of the blue. Try to imagine it again and try to measure it by using the corners of your childhood bedroom and you’ll see what this tension, this magnetism, this vibration, the poetic charge produces first and foremost: warmth, heat.

The subject of this research, this article, is informed by all of this, that’s why I called it: Species of Magnets in my house -see figure 1 and 2-  (small reference of course). For I have in my possession three texts that all deal with the design of such things, but all push and pull the same way, that is to say; like a magnet do. For to live is to imagine, is to speak from one magnet to the other while doing my very best not to bump myself. All these texts I wrote while walking in out of my house, while I did my very best not to bump myself  (of course).

 

 

Texts

 

I

I am the translator.

I am the the one who was too late. But I am the one who in time, has to defy and define, a divine straight line, or something in between, a shape and a dream.

Escabeau, 60° 55″ 6,54′

L’été, 51° 33′ 7,43′

 

II

In 1972, my grand-father left my grand-mother’s house in Strombeek, on the hilly outskirts of Brussels, for the first time. Just before his departure, he poured Pisang on the balcony, sealed off with dead plant leaves and broken pieces of glass, the apertures in which the different rooms were discussed and assembled, made alterations to the provision of shadow cells by taking 100.000 Belgian franks and left a feeling of sultriness and a trail of ashes on the radio, bookshelves and the countable rugs and carpets, making these regions of the house the most fertile for the following thirty years. But it was only during the last act, the act of inserting a silver object into a vexed area of a piece of wood, that he pronounced the terms of condition, while exposed to the strange and morose rendering of the orange light.

They are the following:

Vincent:

A day run astray but not lost. A dried-up carpet stain, a spastic vibration, taken faraway. A closed sometimes, while the sun comes in, anew.

Douffet:
A choice that at high temperatures glows in an environment of nitrogen and/or carbon monoxide and disposes, by means of evaporation a ceaseless flow of microscopic particles, which settle themselves on the inside of the house, whereby the house, in time, dusks.

Honte, La:

It is either a military tactic or an ululation (Klaagzang) that has it’s origin in the first sounds. It is a particular, grievous mode of weather which is converted into language upon its death.

Brasschaat, Belgique:

A form of rain that is neither poor nor stubborn. Theoretically, there’s an occurrence of acuity when approached, but acuity is relative and subbordonante to the songs and the smoke of the sea, plus, lake and the melancholy which is cherished by a diffusing sky.

 

III

Index of words used in this article:

Act

Albeit

Am

Anew

Animal

Aperatures

Are

Argument

Ashes

Assembled

Astray

Bachelard, Gaston,

Balcony

Bedroom 

Belgian

Best

Bump

But

Carbon

Carpets

Ceaseless

Childhood

Choice

Condition

Corners

Day 

Deal

Dispose 

Douffet

Dream

Dried-up

Each

Effect

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Environment

Escabeau

Faraway

Feeling

First

Following

Forms

For

Franks

Grievous

Hand-out

Heat 

High

Honte, la

I

Implications

Inhabit

In

Klaagzang

Last

Leans

Level

Magnetic

Military

Morose

Neither

Nipomo

Nitrogen

Notions

Object 

Occurrence

Off

Orange

Outskirts

Phenomenology 

Pieces

Pisang

Poetic

Questions

Radio

Research

Room

Run

Shadow

Shape

Something

Spastic

Straight

Strombeek

Sultriness

Sun

Tactic

Tension

Time

Together

Too

Trail

Translator

Ululation

Universe

 Very 

Vice a versa

Vincent

Visual

Waldo, Ralph Emerson

Warmth

Weather

With

Words

Years

zig zag

 


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