The Language of Inquiry

Preface to Writing Is an Aid to Memory

Preface to Writing Is an Aid to Memory In the fall of 1977, not long after my family and I had moved back to Berkeley from Mendocino County (and into a neighborhood very near where I had lived as a child), Geoff Young, the editor of The Figures, invited me to write a manuscript for his press. The result was Writing Is an Aid to Memory.1 In that work, I attempted to explore some epistemological relationships that hold time to language and language to time. This is an area that continued to fascinate me, and I took up the problem again when writing My Life (the book that followed Writing Is an Aid to Memory), but while in My Life I was interested in posing sentences and blocks of sentences (paragraphs) as units of time, in Writing Is an Aid to Memory I was working in a mode that was more elemental, more obviously (and more radically) materialist, and my interest was in building time. I wanted to release the flow of accumulated time in syntax and thereby to make time happen. Obversely, I wanted to release the flow of accumulated syntax in time and thereby make sentences (and their concomitant thoughts) happen. In both cases, I felt that formations of knowledge could be made perceptible—offering a picture of knowledge underway. 22 Language gives structure to awareness. And in doing so it blurs, and perhaps even effaces, the distinction between subject and object, since language is neither, being intermediate between the two. The Preface was written after the poem, and in substance it can perhaps best be said to consist of traces of it. I am always conscious of the disquieting runs of life slipping by, that the message remains undelivered, opposed to me. Memory cannot, though the future return and proffer raw confusions. Knowledge is part of the whole, as hope is, from which love seeks to contrast knowledge with separation, and certainty with the temporal. Abridgment is foolish, like a lopping off among miracles ; yet times are not enough. Necessity is the limit with forgetfulness , but it remains undefined. Memory is the girth. Mute and blind at its disposal, each can express, say, moral attitudes but does not have the power to say different things at one time with or without different parts or view—a merchant, inventor, politician , and mechanics. Or a body of elements, ideas, such as anything slender with certainty requires—without repetition of bulk, melancholy, or distance. And flesh else like one in clothing and colors to become versatile, sinews and bones in great versatility . One calls from experience origin and ends in a manual activity , seems vain activity, and terminates another at the middle known to one as doubt. Certainty senses which essence is reopened about cessation and open tongues: -vities, -vatives, known and do but the proper commentary. The distant person carries science and lying. Argument demonstrates that truth cannot end. Continuous quantities, like continuous qualities, are endless like the truth, for it is impossible to carry them. It is impossible to carry light and darkness, proximity, chance, movement, restlessPreface to Writing Is an Aid to Memory / 23 ness, and thought. From all of these, something spills. The greatest gifts are returned by influences, and sometimes beauty turns my attention by endeavor, where action is beyond praise and courage so increased beyond the true—as if the true were an arithmetic or fame and could increase. I would add greatly to the beauty by those feeling conversant; but where to put it? With its indispensable side out, where nothing is greater, the laws of shadowy detail, to the smallest detail, even of the corpses of criminals held long in prison, as inhuman medicine, sketching the action from the insides of the bones and exploring what has been a mind, unknown. I am pressed with questions as if posed and feverish with a peculiar greed. Incessant knowledge and the natural sciences of difficulty, brilliance, complexity , and generosity, to please an entire face, where sorrow by the fact is not of true greatness. Work is retarded by such desire, which is anticipation of its certainty, and hence a desire impossible of satisfaction, in the future despite the grand decision to pull it present. It is that interest as lapse of time, that wanting to put too much in, is forgetting, or the forgotten calling attention. The whole...