I will now present you with a nearly incomprehensible free-association that I wrote down mostly to try and keep (ha! to record! just like I was thinking about!) the ideas in my head after a good class /discussion with a classmate /book reading.
It replaces anything personal and sounds all chipperly and incomprehensibly academic again. There are many of us who pursue a strategy of Thinking Ourselves to Sleep -- a strategy which can sometimes backfire, but which in my case is working right now. I think and think and think and it helps me not think thoughts that stop me from living.
So therefore, academic free association. For outside reference, should this be followoable at all, the Winchester Troper is a 10th century book that records the "tropes" around the Mass ceremony as performed at Winchester Cathedral. Tropes, in this sense, were little original compositions of music and text that go around the liturgy for the day. So the incipit of the Introit is "Puer natus est." But in the 9th and 10th century, they start writing all this stuff that goes before that and in between it and the next part of the service. An act of creation that is also an act of reinterpretation or rearrangment.
A rehtorical trope, on the other hand, is a strategy of reorganization/reunderstanding -- any rhetorical strategy, more or less. In Narratology, the four "Master Tropes" are metaphor, metonymy, synechdoche, and irony. So basically in rhetoric, it means "ways to organize your thought." And obviously when you apply that to medieval trope and to what that means about composition and interpretation you get exciting stuff. So. Free association follows.
Had long and interesting conversation with classmate Ashley about collecting/constricting/recording following class on Winchester Troper and the development of musical notation/its relationship to troping/metaphor/metonymy.
Am trying to get at something that works out to something like the magic of translation or translation of the body – transubstantiation, metamorphosis, and metaphor. It can induce transcendence and anxiety, probably both.
Then we heard this talk by Maya Jasanoff about her book. And she turned out to be talking about collecting! About using physical relics, and the passage she read was literally about the tomb or reliquary this one guy directed to be constructed for him, in India, where he had lived (he was Franco/English) – about using these to perpetuate/construct/record Empire. To possess a country by possessing its things? More. To reconstitute it.
To re-enact it – but that’s drama. The way in which we are somehow motivated by the silent absences to reconstitute that which is missing.
And we were talking about accents – about the recreation of “authentic” Shakespearean accent/the construction of RP. And about the act of fixing that is entailed by the OED and its pronunciation guides – as he pointed out, they have declared that the sound of the word is the word – not its variant spellings. It is the spoken, performed thing which is the word. They even have variant meanings.
And we had been talking before that about the impulse to record all pieces of music and plays, about the hysteria, as I feel it, of digitization, of preserving an enacting. And I was saying that I thought this was a new way to think about recording itself – that its purpose should be to capture performance, not some Platonic Ideal, the Original Authorial Text.
And somehow this fits into tropes and into musical notation and into relics and reqliquaries, to fetishization as legitimate human impulse, to substituting the container for the contained, and the ability to do that being a major anxiety of human consciousness. Because the slippage between self and other, between one thing and the next the essential gulf, the silence and the secret in the middle of everything is the Secret between the self and the world, that essential, ever-mediated gap between perception and lived experience, maybe. We liken and trope, we recreate and thus create, we translate – and here we have to put into place the operation of magic and ritual to entail or understand the bridge between two things – to get over the liminal! Yes! The missing body of Christ, the Secret, the Transformed and Transformative. Something. Something is there. Because Something is Not There.
Okay. Enough with the wildly associative stream of consciousness. Back to work on Spectacular Politics in the drama of the 18th century. But this is a new/old line of thought that I like very much, as far as I can tell. If I can manage to hold on to it, and even more to ground it in the practical, it could be useful. Grounding is important: as I said to Ashley, “I’m a pragmatist more than anything else, and we always have to mediate and make-do, to shift and to deal with shiftiness.”
And that involves keeping things practical – involves the actual bones of the saint, not just what they represent. And on a more mundane level, involves me doing the work I’m supposed to be doing. Now
It replaces anything personal and sounds all chipperly and incomprehensibly academic again. There are many of us who pursue a strategy of Thinking Ourselves to Sleep -- a strategy which can sometimes backfire, but which in my case is working right now. I think and think and think and it helps me not think thoughts that stop me from living.
So therefore, academic free association. For outside reference, should this be followoable at all, the Winchester Troper is a 10th century book that records the "tropes" around the Mass ceremony as performed at Winchester Cathedral. Tropes, in this sense, were little original compositions of music and text that go around the liturgy for the day. So the incipit of the Introit is "Puer natus est." But in the 9th and 10th century, they start writing all this stuff that goes before that and in between it and the next part of the service. An act of creation that is also an act of reinterpretation or rearrangment.
A rehtorical trope, on the other hand, is a strategy of reorganization/reunderstanding -- any rhetorical strategy, more or less. In Narratology, the four "Master Tropes" are metaphor, metonymy, synechdoche, and irony. So basically in rhetoric, it means "ways to organize your thought." And obviously when you apply that to medieval trope and to what that means about composition and interpretation you get exciting stuff. So. Free association follows.
Had long and interesting conversation with classmate Ashley about collecting/constricting/recording following class on Winchester Troper and the development of musical notation/its relationship to troping/metaphor/metonymy.
Am trying to get at something that works out to something like the magic of translation or translation of the body – transubstantiation, metamorphosis, and metaphor. It can induce transcendence and anxiety, probably both.
Then we heard this talk by Maya Jasanoff about her book. And she turned out to be talking about collecting! About using physical relics, and the passage she read was literally about the tomb or reliquary this one guy directed to be constructed for him, in India, where he had lived (he was Franco/English) – about using these to perpetuate/construct/record Empire. To possess a country by possessing its things? More. To reconstitute it.
To re-enact it – but that’s drama. The way in which we are somehow motivated by the silent absences to reconstitute that which is missing.
And we were talking about accents – about the recreation of “authentic” Shakespearean accent/the construction of RP. And about the act of fixing that is entailed by the OED and its pronunciation guides – as he pointed out, they have declared that the sound of the word is the word – not its variant spellings. It is the spoken, performed thing which is the word. They even have variant meanings.
And we had been talking before that about the impulse to record all pieces of music and plays, about the hysteria, as I feel it, of digitization, of preserving an enacting. And I was saying that I thought this was a new way to think about recording itself – that its purpose should be to capture performance, not some Platonic Ideal, the Original Authorial Text.
And somehow this fits into tropes and into musical notation and into relics and reqliquaries, to fetishization as legitimate human impulse, to substituting the container for the contained, and the ability to do that being a major anxiety of human consciousness. Because the slippage between self and other, between one thing and the next the essential gulf, the silence and the secret in the middle of everything is the Secret between the self and the world, that essential, ever-mediated gap between perception and lived experience, maybe. We liken and trope, we recreate and thus create, we translate – and here we have to put into place the operation of magic and ritual to entail or understand the bridge between two things – to get over the liminal! Yes! The missing body of Christ, the Secret, the Transformed and Transformative. Something. Something is there. Because Something is Not There.
Okay. Enough with the wildly associative stream of consciousness. Back to work on Spectacular Politics in the drama of the 18th century. But this is a new/old line of thought that I like very much, as far as I can tell. If I can manage to hold on to it, and even more to ground it in the practical, it could be useful. Grounding is important: as I said to Ashley, “I’m a pragmatist more than anything else, and we always have to mediate and make-do, to shift and to deal with shiftiness.”
And that involves keeping things practical – involves the actual bones of the saint, not just what they represent. And on a more mundane level, involves me doing the work I’m supposed to be doing. Now
Labels: identity, poetics, reading, spirit of the age
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