ABOUT Entice with Disgust (Part III):
I repeat city vagabonds also leak, and leakiness always deepens disgust. We leak here in the weblog, alongside all the sexual and other physical negative ambiguities of leakiness we might play with here, the nature of these Posts is a leaky literariness, one easily sidetracked and seduced, one prone to both our day and night dreams, imaginations and forgettings, wandering from place to place accross thresholds and frontiers, always creating ‘an active boundary’.
What Anne Carson defines as ‘an active boundary’. The description is in her essay entitled "Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)" in her latest book Decreation. At a certain point Anne Carson explores sleep in Antiquity through Plato’s Krito, examining the dialogue of Socrates with his companion Krito – ‘Plato has constructed the opening of this dialogue in such a way as to align the realms of waking and sleeping, drawing out attention to an active boundary between them – active because it leaks’.
Active because it leaks; the column of these Posts is active because it does not, cannot hold. It leaks. The nature of weblog is to constantly dissolve the current in the instant of those succeeding, always the next and then the next. For our stories to be reconstructed, a machinery and a methodology for the leaky is required, one able to support an ‘active boundary’.
On Saturday in Bath I was shown such a machinery and methodology by Professor David Blank, one of the world’s experts on the 2000 year old papyrii scrolls that have survived and are still being excavated from beneath the lava of Vesuvius in the suburbs of Naples in southern Italy. Professor’s Blank’s talk, "Matching tops and bottoms: reconstructing a Herculaneum papyrus and an atomist rhetoric", described a double reconstruction from Antiquity; first a physical face-to-face one, that of reconnecting in the right order the separate sections of text written on the surviving papyrii segments of scroll, making allowances for the leakage, all the losses and gaps, perhaps three-quarters of the original scroll, through the breaking up and crumbling to dust of the papyrii as the sections were originally unwound and cut off, and afterwards in storage and as a result of human handling; then a second reconstruction, making meaning from the imaginary meetings with the descendants of Plato, the rejoining of the lost words of Nausiphanes of Teos who lived in the 4th century BCE, of whom almost nothing is known.
Nearly everything has leaked away. As is the situation HERE, both imagined and face-to-face. As well as our leaky literariness, there is the intrinsic fragility of the electronic medium of weblog storage (unlike the Roman papyrii scrolls what chance any of these Posts surviving the next 2,000 years!), and none of us has the time or resource to live our lives doubly over literally bringing back to life the Archives of our electronic libraries, an absurd and an impossible hubris.
HERE as city vagabonds, the essence of Entice with Disgust, we may reconstruct because we leak…
mmj