Hummingbirds
(In which Lisa Robertson examines the complicated history of grace in Henri Bergson’s
“An Introduction to Metaphysics,” with special attention to the nomenclature of colours)
A nomenclature of the symbols and the colours with which to translate gates made of cold shuttlecocks has long been desired in the arts and sciences.
In the one case, you must begin outside the process of translation in order to possess the original object; in the other, you can no longer move the remaining fiberglass, balsa wood and copper indices with which we first sought to cloak our intellectual ampleness.
A girl in a black cotton dress feeling simple and indivisible should experience this exhausted narrative hardening to currency, into which your unfortunate descriptions will continue to disappear.
You worked with painstaking fidelity on the colour which properly constitutes its essence – indigo blue – but which cannot be perceived near the ocean. Then Jésuitique, en valise, à l’Italienne and à la Russe were all mixed with a little carmine red, and a small portion of chestnut brown.
Thus, reason stood identified with the infinite, an impression that passage in Homer made upon me, when I first saw the shadow of the hummingbird translate these lines into azure and reddish-black, with the act’s absurdity balanced by its excess.
You knew a lady who wanted to release the antithetical expression you announced in your video. “Your female coloration,” you’d said, which was both esoteric and practical, with the measuring, testing and rebelling reducing the object to elements already known – elements common to the one you did not wish to represent in an infinite parking-lot.
By this intuition, it is possible to hear the sound of pages slowly turning, with the gate looking a lot like the entrance to a world of tree houses, where the ordinary function of positive science is analysis.
This positive science conducts a kind of deeply described change, with the weight of living beings and their organs and anatomical elements making comparisons between these forms and the present confusion in the naming of colours all but impossible.
In flowing through time, our selves endure by means of description and a whole mass of insistent perceptions which are profoundly clear, distinct and juxtaposable, one with another.
This crowd of virtual actions is more or less firmly bound to the uncovering of the potential indifference of carnations to peat moss, with the latter’s leek green colouring composed of emerald green, brown and bluish grey.
That woman certainly inspired you to a thoroughness which can, properly speaking, be said to form multiple states when compared to the unrolling of time, wherein the second moment contains the colour veinous blood red, which is carmine red mixed with brownish black, over and above the first.
Such facts lie beneath the grasp of contemporary research, which curates its procession of hormones, continually dying and being born again. In what other way could one represent unconsciousness as a velocity? (Please excuse the rhetorical question).
How difficult is it to choose between systems in which every comparison will be insufficient? The unrolling of the symbols of our duration in reality cannot be substituted for the five hundred words in your nervous lines on the concept of unity, multiplicity and continuity, or for the metaphysical investigation of what is essentially unique to the object of your spit.
Your prosody of being can only symbolize a certain general knowledge of colours, which, though differing in shade and tint from any other colour in the series, will produce that great vulnerability I see on your face.
This is the fucked-up surface of the shapely pleasure you spoke about, with the ennoblement of your other hand in that old photograph. Your lipstick was black, of course, and when you awoke from your dream you did indeed boil your dress in ink, adding a little lavender and red ochre.
The concept of a nomenclature of colours generalizes at the same time as it abstracts, positing a museum of bread, screws, taffeta, twill, flannel, velveteen and satin – worsted or nothing, so you said.
Sometimes, the confusion between formal levels and the vicious circle does that to your data, and more or less deforms the properties which the extensions first gave to it.
It took you a long time nonetheless, with the specificity of your desires shivering in the brutal mobility of the old turquoise city. It was once a place of diminutive need, with everything inscribed in so many circles, none of them now fitting exactly where you fall to your knees.
This is the time for your late crying style, because its properties coincide with the reality of the larger circles dividing the concrete unity of the objects into distinct schools of inconvenience – each a rigid and ready-made pessimist, with its immateriality spoken, transmitted and made entirely temporal.
Maybe your resistance came over you like that dream in which the suites of colours are accompanied with examples in, or references to, the Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral Kingdoms.
Divided into juxtaposed portions of cream yellow, which is ochre mixed with a little white, and a very small quantity of dutch orange – like porcelain jasper, or the breast of a teal drake – you again saw the shadow of the hummingbird come first, and the hummingbird itself second.
This problem of human personality contains within it virtually the entire past and present of that line of description in which your theory of tears became rhythmic. As such, that special colouring of the personality – which cannot be expressed in common terms – is actually composed of berlin blue, a little black and a small portion of apple green.
To reconstitute the poem in different possible arrangements, you went out into orality to purchase a pencil with an image of open weeping. There, you fell out of your ink-stained sheets and frayed lingerie, and into a world of plurals, according to your preference for God and for the existence you saw beneath the tree.
Between these psychical states you have invented nothing with which to fill the gaps, should one part of you catch fire in the non-convergence of the transformed rhymes.
The transcendental speculations of certain German pantheists have to be chosen from a heap of nearly identical rose red melodic patterns. In the sequence of curiosity so formed, we are able to understand the model of the descent from the summit into the multiplicity of pyramids on the green graph-distribution cloud.
There is hardly any concrete reality to this hostile alien shabbiness, with its elbow grease fumbling in smoke grey (which is ash grey mixed with a little brown), by way of the remarkably indirect path you took through the diurnal irregularities with your superlative social intellect, and so far from the remarkably secular index of rhythms we’d compiled with such difficulty.
To carry this modus operandi into philosophy is to pass from concept to contradiction through the very heart of the object and the method of your mind.
This uncertain convention of intimacy, agony and insult rears its battered head in the considered psychology of the stationary, especially when isolated from the totality of the dress as payment for entrance into the symbolic order.
There will be a period of spinal flower-wearing, for which the city has the right to destroy you, in light of the operations which science needs to make for the proper development of a socio-affective structure through which to describe the skies and meteors of different countries, and the numerous varieties of colours that can occur therein.
To that end, I have extracted a general becoming and not becoming of peculiar things from the preoccupied margin of the vocable concept of time which this state clearly occupies.
To look at these different concrete durations will permit us to count both esoteric and practical feelings and forgettings, with the irresistible tendency to consider the data as it shimmers over such iterative terrain in aurora red, which is tile red, with a slight tinge of carmine.
This often useful concept of the qualitative change in a colour you know has already been forgotten is going to spare you the immaterial quarrels perpetuated between the trees and the lights, which are on a level with the duration of the psychical nature of the component parts of the symbols given in this series.
Two melodic patterns sequenced into splendidness at the same time as the essentially violent metaphysical intuitions of apocalyptic consciousness dissipated the obscurities accumulated around the city’s great battlefields. Nonetheless, the cooking pots you felt necessary for this hypothesis will only be here for a single winter, amongst an infinity of other possible durations.
Henceforth, although you may want total gestural plasticity, Mademoiselle Falconetti’s anarchic excess already has the illusion of quivering and variegated concrete reality, the distinct moments of which will describe your odd survival as not incompatible with this first effort towards a concrete durational intuition.
Having presented a general view of the first application of pale bluish purple to the train crossings and tape loops, the insufficient means by which you slept, wrote, and listened became mainly functional in your tendency to process change in the ordinary course of life, the fixed points all marked in scarlet red and umber brown within the taxonomy of the imaginary structure of love’s choices.
Each concept (and each sensation) is thus a practical question which puts the lateness of the city’s feelings for sex and bodies together with the pulsing civic medium in which you saw the shadow of the hummingbird, and beneath which the skeptical, critical doctrines of indispensable civic impotence really dwell.
In fact, all such doctrines attaining to the absolute transience of banality do violence to the perpetually revised and recast categories of colours which have become so useful in the description of the objects of natural history and the arts.
Your insistent indifference to the sex of the expressive atmosphere branching out from Saint Radegund’s desk makes this a site for terror, warning us against the hostile and alien horns which arrived in the diagram, accompanied by a strong aroma of melancholy and coffee.
This limiting case of natural metaphysics will measure the earth for its wretchedness, moving towards that chimera of modern philosophy: the objects of metaphysical differentiation and integration performed in pitch, or brownish black, with all of your cruelty still intact.
You believe this object has been lost sight of, which is why science itself has bitten into the fruit you invented as a continuous action of the given world, carrying with it the great discovery of poetry as freedom, not form. You wanted the shape of these well-defined concepts to lead the professorate in considering the paucity of the various shades of dark green, the new colour of Werner’s added since the publication of his Nomenclature.
Forgetting the metaphysical abstraction from which this truly intuitive union of science, metaphysics and charcoal springs, the vines and crumpled mosaics of this error not only lie there, but dominate the belief that the cracks in the wall are peeling and collapsing in greenish grey, the colour of the quill feathers of the robin.
An enfeebled period of contemplation followed, in which the specificity of your desires remained an unfinished happening in the affirmation of our knowledge that misapplied metaphysics has frequently labored to the same unfortunate end.
The negative rhythmic sexual sequencing of our thought has remained intransigent however, even as the emotional education you proposed has been scaled up to differentiate the illegitimacy of the windowsills and driftwood.
This longing after the restlessness of life – an invisible undercurrent in modern philosophy – does indeed focus first on the shadow of the hummingbird. For, once brought down from heaven to earth, as Plato held, it is in the common coloration of all these small animals fighting in the trees in which we delight.
Our whole prosody of noise has been misapprehended in the russet and scotch blue mountainsides, where, mixed with a considerable portion of velvet black, the complete Critique of Pure Reason rests on the postulate that our unknowing pronouns can expand within the convivial manifestation of so many arbitrary and ephemeral solutions.
In the end, this is yet another theoretical fantasy of the all-responsible senses and the modern metaphysics of irreducible oppositions.
The modern science of philosophy consists precisely in this effort to seize an intuition which is gone but for the memory of its dress, recognizing that for a long time we swam through the splendidness of psychological analyses full of tenderness for the feminine.
This wordless lightning shoots upwards through all of the positive sciences, but has become far too specialized for the metaphysical intuition you felt was justified by the cadences of our sonic structures. In the end, these have not been faithful to the summary and synthesis of that miniature world’s knowledge of the methods of distinguishing colours, their shades, or varieties.
It is a distinctive property of this essence that intuition without conception is a banality. Your gentlemanly literary pursuits annotating the idea of a long elastic present fall within the province of Werner’s analysis, and from successive points of view we can note many resemblances between the blue and green objects and the absolute and unconditional demands of transcription.
This is a decision we may sympathize with intellectually – our own windshield wipers, train crossings and tape loops stirring these tendencies and motor habits – but the flaw in this crowd of virtual actions is clearly visible wherever you go in the city.
Your differential collective of vermilion red cosmetics (which is scarlet red, with a minute portion of brownish red) queries a face made of pure cotton, nylon, rubber and leather, with a fidelity so solidly organized and so profoundly animated that I could never have believed your new skin would be so parodic, esoteric and practical.
Fleece, honey and hummingbirds – partly vibrant, partly wavering, partly failing – this is the prosody which has been ultimately misapprehended here. It occupies its intended psychological space, certainly, but juxtaposed against the notion of the pure durational contrary, we are inevitably drawn back to Werner’s unfounded conclusions regarding morbid anatomy, social rupture, and the mixing and laying of colours.
Reading The Great Classics Of
Canlit through
Book 2 of bpNichol’s The
Martyrology
Time told you what moving the muse will save: useless saints, fucking lies
Never much good, i
watch thru a gate of clouds
saw Saint Ory in
a silken shroud
knew which mask
to wear
Once i thot each
phrase new & now see the tight
phrases & cursed verse screaming
My thot slurred together
you to
me, Mister Reat
These puns are
stronger than words i could throw down at this tumbling green land, spun for
your own destruction
the times so pointless, blaming you
People watch over
as you pass the bodies, slipping off
dreams
The country spoke
of having travelled the daze dust & centuries
pile up within my
vision of the world’s end & beginning
lost chords struck within, look to start new the moment
You reach for the
knife & Saint And too, the difference exploding at what signs, what
miraculous bright sun clear like it
was a casual gesture
opening the palm of his hand
made
the transition
Many chose to
follow the first Saint Orm, with the final resolution
to be truly Saint Orm
I mean you no
wrong, but the country channels blue sky
music
upon the image of her
face
tensions building in the poem, to pass thru senseless, as i know nothing
the truth’s obscure behind the body’s veil
In the midst of the poem, a bright moon, perfect circle on the world’s rim. A saint’s face among the stars & it changes constantly
Saint Orm i know is over the spell of language, the form of memory turning inside you. i dreamt the world ended last night in town
you chose to travellove is carried in her eyes
a trick a lovely gesture in the air
You drifted in thru the door my dreams left open i step sideways to regain the chance the part least recognized merges with me
times change the earth slips the bodies(Saint And you) stand in mourning hearing this i refuse yr telegram in van
Too long breaking the
ideas, the words or that illogical confusion love is. Saint Rike, old &
grey, did offer keys rules perceptions charted You were there that moment, then Saint
And stumbled thru
no longer trusting senses we dream
make them more real
His lady the greatest mystery deceives us. We raise you up
the
closet opens
into the blue, it’s true
There on my right, the white tiger; on my left, afternoon poems as acts of geomancy – the lost art noone teaches. With real energy my body releases one apparent life destroyed made whole again repetition, the rythmic structure
Born in the states,
came north with their sons – older or too young – & found his voice again. My lips move to speak
poor John’s dead & gone
Here i have illuminated the dream announced in Kitchener: instructions to the unknown millions. Saint Rand walked out too, to rip off the mask of words the chains we must pass thru to the light thru the window
I always will, you cried out passing as you are here beneath the land
Men carry them to the last night we found the first charioteer, a rider of the missing Pleiade going nova around 2000 b.c. The temple of Ptah, its these figures apparent as glyphs between the rocks
my heart faster than i thot it could
Your fingers blessing among the leaves slowly nights spent watching the constellations swing round one time
as the dragon’s wings
the trees
these words, move, conjoin a common point of death is unexpected
These poems are prayers west into darkness, ellie & I driving. The world is not only the words you trust too often by making the present living history
to make difficult fencesThe window pane
i want to explain as composition
I stop writing, i cease to matter, only the moment we exist. In this section Terry died & here i am now talking with Phyllis
the kropotkin poems, she’d first realized gathering what’ll we say next time North America crumbles down
We spend time wrapped in our separate silences. Where do you go, when some lonely night like this you are dead?
Christ, you are dead, deadflesh becoming real scraptures behind the assertion of reality
Ah there is only the words
this moment everything present & tense. The mind moves free, free of presence, your voice speaking, whispering
I do love you.
