You made me google Edmond Jabès.

Maçon d'eau d'air d'ombre
je l'ai reconnu à sa carrure
aux tunnels de ses mains profondes
transparentes par endroit
comme des taches de jour sur l'onde

Ses couteaux mûrissent dans mes sentiers
Ils tournent dans l'air come des étoiles
et deviennent flèches de ma nuit quant je dors

reminds of that quote in waking life...

couldn't find it (something about how we connect to our baby pictures through stories) but here's another one!

http://us.imdb.com/Quotes?0243017 : "When it was over, all I could think about was how this entire notion of oneself, what we are, is just this logical structure, a place to momentarily house all the abstractions. It was a time to become conscious, to give form and coherence to the mystery, and I had been a part of that. It was a gift. Life was raging all around me and every moment was magical. I loved all the people, dealing with all the contradictory impulses - that's what I loved the most, connecting with the people. Looking back, that's all that really mattered."

btw erik davis has his matrix article for salon up on his website :D

http://techgnosis.com/matrixre.html

I've read through that at least three times over three days and I still have only half an idea of what he's talking about.

Could it perhaps have something to do with the old Einstein quote?

"When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity."

By the way, cognitive science has long established that our brains have many different faculties with specialized functions, only some of which have anything to do with language. When people make sweeping generalizations about thought, memory, etc. which assume that language is central to all of them, I am forced to conclude that they're armchair philosophers who pay little attention to empiricism.

Eschew temporality!

The passage seems careful to avoid talking about duration in terms of the flow of time, but rather in ordinal terms of things taking place one before another. Durability--rather than duration--in the face of the erosively grinding mechaninsms of thought, or the eye scanning a page of text, one letter after the next, building thoughts and ideas, some of which will evaporate or be destroyed after the next sequence of letters, others which will be supported by the process, built upon, and endure.

Reading Jabès, I always find it helpful to have in mind the shapes of the letters, the spaces between them, where the connections are strong, or likely to fail, and the process of the author building something that must be built and rebuilt upon every reading.

Prentiss: But in this passage Jabès doesn't mention language until the end, the first paragraph doesn't mention it at all, unless you mean "classify" which can be a non-linguistic or extra-linguistic capability. And I'd say one of the most salient non-linguistic cognitive functions is our ability to assign and eschew the passage of time.

"In its passage through thought, through words, every memory appears like a sickness of language" -- It doesn't seem as if language is primary, but a contagion.

What I liked about this passage was the idea that what we choose to "stop at" is what we cannot successfully compartmentalize, understand as an event that just happens as what happened before and what happened after.

And yes, Jim there is some kind of (i hate to use this word) slippage betwen the "duration" of the first paragraph and the "durable" of the second that I haven't, er, managed to neutralize yet.

:)

Caterina, you're right that his invocation of language is less central than I implied.

Jim, I like your phrase, "erosively grinding mechanisms of thought". Another lesson of neurology and cognitive science which has filtered down to me via pop-sci (and is therefore suspect): memories are not static things stored away untouched until they are recalled, but rather memory involves an active process of reviewing and renewing old connections. The renewal process is far from non-lossy, and we tend to fill in gaps with logical or imaginative material of our own creation.

That's part of why the legal profession is now cluing into the fact that the memories of witnesses are so unreliable. I suspect it also has a lot to do with how and why mnemotechnics works. And it reminds me of the problem facing digital preservationists: if they don't continually migrate resources to new media and data formats, they will lose them.

And that's just in English, where duration and durability have both a temporal sense and a resistance to wear sense. I wonder what the French sense(s) of the Latin durare (to last) is.

From a naughty Italian bar toast, I know that Italian has this dual sense as well.

Whatever the sense, I think that thermodynamics has it all wrong. Entropy doesn't increase over time. Time (if such a thing there be) flows in the direction of entropy increase.

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