Thus, in being, everything is circuitous, roundabout, recurrent, so much talk; a chaplet of sojournings, a refrain with endless verses.
But what a spiral man’s being represents! And what a number of invertible dynamisms there are in this spiral! One no longer knows right away whether one is running toward the center or escaping.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. 214.
Sometimes, on the contrary, instead of becoming welded together, words loosen their intimate ties. Prefixes and suffixes—especially prefixes—become unwelded: they want to think for themselves.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. 213.
Therefore, and in a certain measure, philosophers are painters; poets are painters and philosophers; painters are philosophers and poets. He who is not a poet and a painter is no philosopher. We say rightly that to understand is to see imaginary forms and figures; and understanding is fancy, at least it is not deprived of fancy. He is no painter who is not in some degree a poet and thinker, and there can be no poet without a certain measure of thought and representation.
Giordano Bruno
Frith, Isabel, Life of Giordano Bruno the Nolan, ed. Prof Mauriz Carriere. Boston: Ticknor, 1887), 16.
in
Higgins, Dick. Horizons, The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. 31. with the footnote, “What Ms. Frith has done is to assemble a montage here of the passages from [Giordano Bruno, Jordani Bruni Nolani Opere Latine Conscripta, 3 vols. in 8 pts. 1891: Bad Cannstatt b. Stuttgart, Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1962) vol. 1, pt. 3, 87-318, esp. 197-99.
Language itself is not perfectly expressed in things themselves. This proposition has a double meaning, in its metaphorical and literal senses: the languages of things are imperfect, and they are dumb. Things are denied the pure formal principle or language—namely, sound. They can communicate to one another only through a more or less material community. This community is immediate and infinite, like every linguistic communication; it is magical (for there is also a magic of matter). The incomparable feature of human language is that its magical community with things is immaterial and purely mental, and the symbol of this is sound. The Bible expresses this symbolic fact when it says that God breathes his breath into man: this is at once life and mind and language.—
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926. ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996. 67.
What is important for me is to understand. For me, writing is a matter of seeking this understanding, part of the process of understanding….Certain things get formulated. If I had a good enough memory to really retain everything that I think, I doubt very much that I would have written anything—I know my own laziness. That is important to me is the thought process itself. As long as I have succeeded in thinking something through, I am personally quite satisfied. If I then succeed in expressing my thought process adequately in writing, that satisfies me also.
Arendt, Hannah. Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954, Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books, 1994.
The ones who can call themselves contemporary are only those who do not allow themselves to be blinded by the lights of the century, and so manage to get a glimpse of the shadows in those lights, of their intimate obscurity. … The contemporary is the one whose eyes are struck by the beam of darkness that comes from his own time.
…
In the firmament that we observe at night, the starts shine brightly, surrounded by a thick darkness. Since the number of galaxies and luminous bodies in the universe is almost infinite, the darkness that we see in the sky is something that, according to scientists demands and explanation…In an expanding universe, the most remote galaxies move away from us at a speed so great that their light is never able to reach us. What we perceive as the darkness of the heavens is this light that, though traveling toward us, cannot reach us, since the galaxies form which the light originates move away from us greater than the speed of light.
To perceive, in the darkness of the present, this light that strives to reach us but cannot—this is what it means to be contemporary.
Agamben, Giorgio. What is an Apparatus, and other essays. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. 45-6.
Is thinking impossible without arbitrary signs? and—how far is the word ‘arbitrary’a misnomer? Are not words etc parts and germinations of the Plant? And what is the law of their Growth?—In something of this order I would endeavour to destroy the old antithesis of Words and Things, elevating as it were, words into Things, and living Things too.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge in
McCaffery, Steve and Jed Rasula, eds. Imagining Language: An Anthology. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1998. 471.
If only people would understand that language and mathematical formulae are alike, in that they constitute their own autonomous worlds, sport with themselves, express nothing but themselves, and for that reason are so wonderfully expressive—for that reason they mirror the odd play of relations between things.
Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772-1801))
Rasula, Jed and Steve McCaffery, eds. Imagining Language, an Anthology. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1998. 502.
I spent my vacation practicing immobility. Sitting in a chair puts you into a void. A device for thinking about writing. Three months later I’d built up enough vertigo to justify a breath of fresh air. (I got up.) I’ll never write another line, I said to the Future. The lines in my hand will have to do. They’re already written down.
Marcel Broodthaers. Broodthaers. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ed. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1988. 30.