Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 1:51 AM
sent by Rachel McRae


This is arguably hyperbolic and aggrivatingly meta (and most definitely poorly written, I blame a chest infection), but here goes. [These are more notes than anything]

[I'm going to bogart, clumsily mimic, Merleau-Ponty's method of writing as illuminating exercise as expressed in the Phenomenology of Language]

I'm going to put forward a proposition, one which I am not entirely convinced of; a proposition I will set out as a kind of conceptual object free to be continually reconstituted as desired/required (this is my way of avoiding a clumsy fact/fiction diametric merger sans explanation of the relationship between the two.)
Note: Diametric having dual definitions, both applicable->
1. Of, relating to, or along a diameter.
2. Exactly opposite; contrary.
The notion of contrary/split is important. In this way, what I am trying to elucidate is not a real countered by an unreality, instead a form of embodied knowing. (An embodied knowing I'm not entirely sure is possible, at least not for a white girl living in a world steeped in a particular form of [secularized] christian logic, yet accordingly I refuse to claim as impossible.)

In an utterly romantic sense, the laborer who works with their hands within the soil is one who knows the earth as flesh. Flesh in a biblical sense: a knowing through embodiment, a being (also in the manner it is used . (S)He works the earth, spreads his/her shit over it, reaps its harvest, dies and goes back to this earth. There is no fissure, all matter on this earth has been here from the beginning, recycled (this is pat physics, but I digress). There is a continuation, a complex unity, and a consideration of existence far more elaborate than a real/unreal diametric. Perhaps that is why "reality," as a concept has "never been of much use out here".

But now I'm going to verge off; for though there is a partial ability to be flesh, at one with the landscape, this experience is also divisible. "Reality's never been of much use out here" ->but it is. There is no reality in the miasma of the west, on the farm, in California... but there is, as much as reality is defined by shifting logic sets and the corporeal concerns. The complex unity is both expansive and local, wholeistic and divisible. Reality is maybe only a tool, only of a use, but also perhaps ultimately destructive (and of no use at all.) But, this itself may shift, be reconstituted...


.............................As for the project, it'll be about fault-lines.

--
Rachel E McRae