Gardening, Not Architecture.

"Excerpt from Vanity." I don't know why. I'm really less worried about the contents of reality these days. I've been considering its constitution and my own. The weather is abnormal - we have warm winters and less fortunate nations (read: oppressed nations) experience natural disasters. Who controls the weather? Is there a conflict going on in the atmosphere?

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Here's an essay I wrote:

Considerations of Silence and Ambient Writing
“My final merit I refuse you….I refuse putting from me the best I am.”
(Whitman 578, pg. 57)
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Restraint and silence are as living and breathing as the loudest linguistic expression. Walt Whitman knows this. Leaves of Grass is a consideration of contingency rooted in the irreducibility of an experiential now: “I believe in you, my soul….the other I am must not abase itself to you,/ And you must not be abased to the other.”(73-74, pg. 32) For Whitman, the berth between the experiential and articulation widens to encompass every I. This berth, or “Being’s truth,” for Heidegger, is a function of its own expression between experience and articulation, signifier and signified and is not reducible to language but rather a practice of performing itself, Being. This is why “poetry that thinks is in truth the topology of Being. This topology tells Being the whereabouts of its actual presence.” (Thinker as Poet) Whitman’s objective in Leaves of Grass seems to be to perform the reciprocal function; saying without speaking and imbuing stillness and silence with a value as great as speech and language; Contingency, being, is used to explicate Being.
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Ferdinand De Saussure does not seem so sure when it comes to defining the space occupied by articulation within the experiential:
Taken as a whole, speech is many-sided and heterogeneous; straddling several areas simultaneously – Physical, physiological, and psychological – it belongs both to the individual and to society; we cannot put it into any category of human facts, for we cannot discover its unity.

Analysis of speech as a whole entity containing language, word pictures and objectival signifieds, according to Saussure, never reveals the true object of scientific linguistic study. (Saussure 296-297) There seems to exist and endless chain of signification in which truth constantly slips:
My words are words of a questioning, and to indicate reality;/This printed and bound book….but the printer and the printing-office boy?/…The well-taken photographs….but your wife or friend close and solid in your arms?/…The saints and sages in history….but you yourself?/Sermons and creeds and theology….but the human brain, and what is called reason, and what is called love, and what is called life? (Whitman l. 1075-1091)

Positing that one can indicate reality, the totality of the experiential, reason, love and life itself through words of questioning seems at first like an impossible feat of language; to do this successfully would be to successfully boil speech down to its essence and “discover its unity.” It is correct to assume that the feat is impossible: it is accomplished when Whitman uses chains of signifiers to highlight the unspoken. The indication he alludes to is a non-indication and thus a more meaningful indication (because it cannot be cluttered up with meaning.)
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The essence of speech is located in the action of speaking but not in the action of saying because “what is spoken is never, and in no language, what is said.” (Thinker as Poet) It follows, then, that silence is its own articulation; the choice not to speak says nonetheless. This is precisely Whitman’s angle: his free verse is not so much the words being used but those which cannot be used because they do not exist, the expressers of the truth of Being. This is what it means to “sing the body electric;” (129) for Heidegger, “singing and thinking are the stems neighbour to poetry,” and must thusly grow close to the topology of Being.
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I mentioned earlier that Whitman’s non-indication is more meaningful than an indication without explaining properly why. Silence exists in flux with articulation because they are each the source of each other, each other’s respective anti-environment: “The role of the artist is to create an anti-environment as a means of perception and adjustment. Without an anti-environment, all environments are invisible.” (McLuhan 30-33) While Whitman would probably flightily declare that the artist is no different than you or I or the president, which is true, he doubtlessly succeeds in the creation of a literal anti-environment in his poetry. Leaves of Grass uses the contingent to access something transcendent, an actual environment inexpressible through articulation but enacted through the failure of articulation: “Clear and sweet is my soul….and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul/ Lack one lacks both….and the unseen is proved by the seen/ Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.” (l. 43-45) Whitman’s anti-environment is useful in that it makes clear the reciprocal relationship between language and the unsayable; that one cannot exist without the other is a fact worthy of careful consideration.
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Though it probably does not actually exist as a literary term, Whitman’s writing is ambient in its effect. Reading any portion of Leaves of Grass demands immersion; the words drift by and embed themselves as small seeds around a mental garden, moving conceptually outwards rather than upwards. One of the Oblique Strategies cards created by ambient godfather Brian Eno and his colleague Peter Schmidt for the aiding of creative decisions reads: “Gardening, not architecture,” suggesting that nurturing growth through hinting at an unarticulated idea can yield organic results at least as rewarding as forced upwards motion, if not more so. While the tradition of ambient music has always been more about sonic and technological experimentation, its primary focus has always been an unsaying rather than speech itself. Whitman’s poetry is the same; while verbose, his lines function as a way to get at the unsaid in similar fashion to Eno’s fiddling with tape loops in order to articulate through the negation of articulation. Being is understood only through immersion in the reciprocal process of saying and not saying.

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The pre-edit edition, anyways. Some of those citations are UGLY. Oh well.

Kerplunk.