also consider the fractal quality of Woolf's sentences. haha; this is me laughing; and now in a separate form but related, and I might just laugh all day.

a few interesting things about what Woolf says:
1. the tendency of some female writers to describe the experience of creating art as a wounding that is both inflicted by and healed through their art making process, see article: The Blank Page: and Issues of Female Creativity.
2. The choice of the word "thing:" in "we are the thing itself" -this only interests me because of the obsession that the writers we have studied this semester, Zuko, HOwe, Olson, have with "things" there are some metaphysical and aesthetic concepts wrapped up in this one word that I am not sure I fully understand.
3. like Zukofsky Woolf removes the particulars. There is no Shakespeare or Beethoven. because we are all the art; pieces of a great infinite art; and I start thinking of chaos theory as we were discussing, and it is interesting to think of the world as a great art-fractal.

virginia woolf/ A sketch of the Past

And so I go on to suppose that it isthe shock-receiving capacity that makes me a writer. I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a tonken of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words....It is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we- I mean all human beings- are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare,there is not Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have shock.

james baldwin

"...to betray a belief is not by any means to have put oneself beyond its power; the betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no more moral standards in the world at all. Yet one must also recognize that morality is based on ideas and that all ideas are dangerous- dangerous because ideas can only lead to action and where the action leads no man can say. And dangerous in this respect; that confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses."

"Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist. This is one of the greatest errors Americans can make. The identity they fought so hard to protect has, by virtue of that battle, undergone a change: Americans are as unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be. I do not think, for example, that it is too much to suggest that the American vision of the world- which allows so little reality, generally speaking, for any of the darker forces in human life, which tends until today to paint moral issues in glaring black and white- owes a great deal to the battle waged by Americans to maintain between themselves and black men a human separation which could not be bridged. It is only now beginning to be borne in on us- very faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and very much against our will- that this vision of the world is dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless. For it protects our moral high-mindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp on reality. ****People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and ****anyone who insists on returning to a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

from Notes of a Native Son...

-let's really try hard not to breed dogmas (haha) or systems of morality, I want only to entertain...thus, to be flexible and...i think it is normal (whatever that is) to question what sort of beliefs one is taking on, because even if we later reject them we may still be bound to them in some ineffable way
being careful!
cheers

What is the realtionship between meaning and entertaining? If meaning is transitory and fluctuating, yet we know that a value is being produced at the same time that it might be destroyed, then perhaps meaning is simply the entertainment of a possibility.

be ot be
out to sea

here we are
are we here
we are here
we hear and are