What a good surprise to find Emily Rosamond’s Choice Blog review this morning! I want to think more about the Bergson coils, which remind me of these vertiginous attempts I’ve been making to capture time in writing, when time stays still neither on the page nor in the air around it.
I’ve put him on my reading list. In the meantime, this tricky meeting ?between language and gesture, letter and line,? as Rosamond puts it, remains energetic and irresponsibly productive. Badiou’s conception of love as a cultivation of difference makes a wonderful analogy for the consequences of gripping onto a metaphor even when it gets unwieldy.
I found the wire in ‘Doing Words with Things’ sometimes worked like an excessively extended metaphor, setting off in language then stretching into things language can’t do. When a metaphor stretches beyond its natural bounds the analogy breaks down?but if you keep hold of it all the same, the broken-down bits fold back into metaphor and force something new into existence.
Sometimes, for instance, the wire construction got too big to handle and Alex would reach over to support a branch of it himself, or grab one of the spools for me and hold it while he signed. Having to simultaneously shape his hands to accommodate both language and wire threw the analogy of letter and line into confusion, and it created new possibilities of expression: the words were forced to shape themselves around the physical edges of the objects they were describing, and at times the objects took over altogether so we were representing things not with words at all, but with the things themselves. After a minute or two the wire bundle would become more manageable again and I’d pull it back into my arms or he?d give back the spool, and this new ambiguity between words and things would subside for a while.
The lurching focus of Rosamond’s tuning fork simile will stay with me: ?The wire mass is like a strangely-manufactured tuning fork, through which the airborne charge of radical difference lurches in and out of focus.? Perhaps the shifting position of the wire?sometimes almost inside language, sometimes far outside it?does similar work to a quick succession of abandoned analogies, each one offering a temporary landing site from which to start again and again, the ground a little more shaken each time.
