I am just catching up with reading this part 1 of Barthe's by Hermann. What a revelation. I want to learn more. What struck me was the idea of the ephemeral and how this is a facet of the phenomenology of the narrative medicine discipline. I think we grapple with trying to explain what happens in this practice and certainly we are challenged with applying matrix to the benefits by way of quantitative data. It is precisely because it is a momentary and transitory experience.
Perhaps for me, the most personal idea presented was the exploration of language and how it is the source of power to both enlighten and oppress. To take language away, to destroy it, is to destroy the person or community it speaks for. I think of the calculated destruction of the indigenous tribal communities of this country. A clear example of what language means to living or dying. The resurrection of a multitude of nearly lost tribal languages is a harbinger of Native ascendance.
One last thing, reading about nuance helps me so much in finding a reason to continue writing. To be able to motivate beyond the "why bother and who cares?"
Oh and Robin - thanks so much for the Wallace Stevens. - Anne
Thank you for this discussion, Nellie. It’s illuminating to hear Barthes’s voice through yours.
For some reason, what comes to mind is Wallace Stevens’s poem, “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself,” in which the speaker awakens “at the earliest ending of winter” and hears “a scrawny cry from outside.” He thinks the sound is coming from his mind. But he knows that he hears it, and in the second stanza identifies it as a bird’s cry, a harbinger of spring. We feel (without the poet telling us outright) the poignancy of his realization that he has lived to see another spring. It is as if he were pinching himself to confirm that what he thinks he hears is real, that it is not a dream. Almost amusingly - because dreams are usually so prized in creative work - Stevens dismisses the stuff of dreams as “the vast ventriloquism/ Of sleep's faded papier mâché . . .” This was not a dream, he thinks, inching closer and closer to certainty; the sun “was coming from outside,” the scrawny cry was that of a chorister (songbird) whose “C preceded the choir.”
The whole experience - his mind, the world outside, the spring to come - is part of the colossal sun. It is the experience and perception of what he sees, still far away, but ratified as a new knowledge of reality.
I can’t say exactly why this comes to mind in response to what you’ve expressed, Nellie. Hopefully it will resonate in some way. For me, the poem is so moving, going to the heart of what induces the writing of poetry. Here is Stevens:
I am just catching up with reading this part 1 of Barthe's by Hermann. What a revelation. I want to learn more. What struck me was the idea of the ephemeral and how this is a facet of the phenomenology of the narrative medicine discipline. I think we grapple with trying to explain what happens in this practice and certainly we are challenged with applying matrix to the benefits by way of quantitative data. It is precisely because it is a momentary and transitory experience.
Perhaps for me, the most personal idea presented was the exploration of language and how it is the source of power to both enlighten and oppress. To take language away, to destroy it, is to destroy the person or community it speaks for. I think of the calculated destruction of the indigenous tribal communities of this country. A clear example of what language means to living or dying. The resurrection of a multitude of nearly lost tribal languages is a harbinger of Native ascendance.
One last thing, reading about nuance helps me so much in finding a reason to continue writing. To be able to motivate beyond the "why bother and who cares?"
Oh and Robin - thanks so much for the Wallace Stevens. - Anne
Thanks for these thoughts, Anne!
Thank you for this discussion, Nellie. It’s illuminating to hear Barthes’s voice through yours.
For some reason, what comes to mind is Wallace Stevens’s poem, “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself,” in which the speaker awakens “at the earliest ending of winter” and hears “a scrawny cry from outside.” He thinks the sound is coming from his mind. But he knows that he hears it, and in the second stanza identifies it as a bird’s cry, a harbinger of spring. We feel (without the poet telling us outright) the poignancy of his realization that he has lived to see another spring. It is as if he were pinching himself to confirm that what he thinks he hears is real, that it is not a dream. Almost amusingly - because dreams are usually so prized in creative work - Stevens dismisses the stuff of dreams as “the vast ventriloquism/ Of sleep's faded papier mâché . . .” This was not a dream, he thinks, inching closer and closer to certainty; the sun “was coming from outside,” the scrawny cry was that of a chorister (songbird) whose “C preceded the choir.”
The whole experience - his mind, the world outside, the spring to come - is part of the colossal sun. It is the experience and perception of what he sees, still far away, but ratified as a new knowledge of reality.
I can’t say exactly why this comes to mind in response to what you’ve expressed, Nellie. Hopefully it will resonate in some way. For me, the poem is so moving, going to the heart of what induces the writing of poetry. Here is Stevens:
NOT IDEAS ABOUT THE THING BUT THE THING ITSELF
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow . . .
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier mâché . . .
The sun was coming from outside.
That scrawny cry—it was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.