essay on essays, like a floating board in a shipwreck, it feels utopian and grungy.
by Ursula LeGuin's "Carrier-Bag Theory", ESSAYISM sometimes wishes it were a thrusting spear, but it is instead a self-conscious bag of contagious wondrous baubles, each one world of how to think/write/think.
quotes from the parts I just read in the bath that made me think of wonder.systems, some in strong agreement, some in disagreement, some in wincing agreement:
Many of us, maybe all of us, look at some images repeatedly, but it seems we do not write that repetition, or think it, once written, worth reading by others. Maybe we deeply want to believe that images happen, essentially or sufficiently, all at once.... Maybe the actual business of repeated gawping strikes us as embarrassing, at least when set out in sentences. (Too passive? Too privileged? Too rudimentary? Too 'male'?) Maybe we fear that the work we depend on images to do for us – the work of immobilizing, and therefore making tolerable – will be undone if we throw the image back into the flow of time.
...
...an extreme example of a tendency [...] towards curiosity: that is, towards a rapt discovery of the world [...] but a way of treating that discovery too: as a collection.
...
The melancholics concern themselves with the structure of doubt, rather than the structure of belief, because doubt is inventive. Doubt complicates. Even repudiation is a doubling. In this sense, doubt is erotic, as is melancholic space.
...I thought if I wrote about the horror at a distance, or described it askance, then it would stay in its place, but I'd be saying enough about it to tell myself that I was not running away. I would be in control. Which was certainly my thing, control.
...
Just that, I suppose: the usual combination of poise and its antipode.