[-empyre-] public lament and gardening

[Alan Sondheim]

On Thu, 4 Oct 2012, Maria Damon wrote:

> Is there then (I'm sort of assuming the answer is yes, but asking anyway in
> order to make it part of the fabric of the conversation) a way in which
> lamentation is also critique as well as community self-constitution, as in
> Lamentations?
>

Maria, I wonder what sort of critique would be possible? Lamentations 
seems to bridge the political and the obdurate. When pain becomes 
overwhelming, silence is at the core and the signifier dissolves; I think 
this is also the core of anguish. One is left speechless. On the other 
hand, how much clarity is necessary for political or 'rational' thought? 
In an odd way this also brings up mathematical thinking - which, from an 
outsider point-of-view, seems based on the manipulation of symbols, but 
from within is much more of clouded movements with indeterminate focus 
(see Jacques Hadamard). Thinking itself, in other words, may well have 
less content than its representations, and certainly its representations 
in virtual worlds, where everything, one way or another, is determinate 
and rationalized on a pixel-by-pixel level.

- Alan, foggier, apologies