[-empyre-] public lament and gardening

[Alan Sondheim]

> which "Lamentations" are you refering to? 
> (not Martha Graham's Lamentation?) 
>

Book of Lamentations in English

All Sandy and I are/were on about, I think, is the silence and the 
obdurate that occurs in relaton to severe pain; I'm thinking for example 
of my mother shortly before her death, when she had been anesthetized to 
alleviate her suffering in the hospice. The silence is also the silence at 
the heart of the signifier; the signifier is both suture and broken 
suture, covering and dis/covering pain, naming it for those who are 
suffering, who can no longer hear the name, who are no longer with us, 
coffin or not - when my father died, there were issues at the cemetary 
about the burial of ashes.

- Alan




>
> Alan schreibt:
>
>
> public lament and gardening
>
> 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.
>
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