"From Blank to Blank":
Excerpts from a Work in Regress
Poetic Metaphor
Poetic metaphor is at the exact center of my belief system precisely because it undermines the possibility of exactness and a center.
Mark Forrester
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Looking at Nothing
"Is it possible to see absolutely nothing? Or do you always see something, even if it is nothing more than a blur or the insides of your own eyelids?
"This question has been well investigated. In the 1930s, a psychologist named Wolfgang Metzer designed an experiment to show that if you have nothing to look at, your eyes will stop functioning. Metzer put volunteers in rooms that were lit very carefully so there was no shadow and no gradients from light to dark. The walls were polished, so it was impossible to tell how far away they were. After a few minutes in an environment like that, the volunteers reported 'gray clouds' and darkness descending over their visual field. Some experienced an intense fear and felt as though they were going blind. Others were sure that dim shapes were drifting by, and they tried to reach out and grab them. Later it was found that if the room is illuminated with a bright color, within a few minutes it will seem to turn dull gray. Even a bright red or green will seem to turn dull gray. "
—James Elkins
One Man Wanting
"Death is at all times solemn, but never so much so as at sea. A man dies on shore; his body remains with his friends, and 'the mourners go about the streets;' but when a man falls overboard at sea and is lost, there is a suddenness in the event, and a difficulty in realizing it, which give to it an air of awful mystery. A man dies on shore—you follow his body to the grave, and a stone marks the spot. You are often prepared for the event. There is always something which helps you to realize it when it happens, and to recall it when it has passed. A man is shot down by your side in battle, and the mangled body remains an object, and a real evidence; but at sea, the man is near you—at your side—you hear his voice, and in an instant he is gone, and nothing but a vacancy shows his loss. Then, too, at sea—to use a homely but expressive phrase—you miss a man so much. A dozen men are shut up together in a little bark, upon the wide, wide sea, and for months and months see no forms and hear no voices but their own, and one is taken suddenly from among them and they miss him at every turn. It is like losing a limb. There are no new faces or new scenes to fill up the gap. There is always an empty berth in the forecastle, and one man wanting when the small night watch is mustered."
—Richard Henry Dana, Jr.,
Two Years Before the Mast
Being No One
"Nobody ever was or had a self. All that ever existed were conscious self-models that could not be recognized as models. The phenomenal self is not a thing, but a process—and the subjective experience of being someone emerges if a conscious information-processing system operates under a transparent self-model. You are such a system right now, as you read these sentences. Because you cannot recognize your self-model as a model, it is transparent: you look right through it. You don't see it. But you see with it."
—Thomas Metzinger,
Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity
Bread Givers
My Amazon Review:
Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers is, in a sense, two overlapping stories. The first half of the book is the melodramatic tale of an impoverished Jewish immigrant family living in the New York ghetto, a family suffering under the tyrannical and hypocritical piousness of the father. At times the foolishness and ineptitude of the father is almost comic, but the suffering inflicted on his family is harrowingly poignant. The second half is a psychologically and sociologically astute feminist coming-of-age tale, as the youngest daughter breaks from her family to re-define herself as an Americanerin, leaving for college and eventually becoming a teacher in her old neighborhood. The broader strokes of the novel's opening give way to provocative considerations of the difficulties inherent in the narrator's at times ambivalent desires for assimilation within an alien culture and for a self-respecting independence from her own patriarchal family.