Envelopes
Hopscotch by Argentine author Julio Cortazar. The novel is one of the first hyper-text novels and if I were writing several months ago I would simply leave it at that; that description would seem straight-forward and self-explanatory. The truth is that it isn't. I read part of a book called Hyper-Text-Theory recently and the word was discussed at great length, without any semblance of an explanation. Who will give a suitable explanation, and what purpose does "hyper-text" serve? Is this not just a broad over-simplification via an abstract term? The difference between the writer and the academic: the writer grows for the soil and the academic plucks from the branch, or grasps at the supermarket; nothing like a broad over-simplification to counter another one. Reading Cortazar's novel one could either be fascinated by the jazz and the keen descriptions of brilliant talk, cigarettes casting long meandering shadows upon the dimly lit walls of Parisian apartments, or the concepts and the style.
For myself, the novel serves the purpose of a strange craft illustrated with simple metaphors: the hopscotch of childhood and the pebble carved with purpose, being kicked towards heaven, and its parallels in a seemingly complex adult life that seeks purpose, but really seeks freedom of movement. This reminds me of my other writing that is less academic, even not at all. Those children's illustrations and simple metaphors with envelopes floating in the air, those peculiar images of clearness, of humor. The necessity of no style, of varied concepts, of dismantling narrative is so difficult in art; it is so difficult to convey something with depth to the critics, because the shape of life has already been managed into literature, into philosophy, into rigid meanings and non-fluid concepts. But for a child the notion of time is non-existent; it is carved into us with culture of a certain kind, and we are sculpted by expectations, by the story that is already in us as a species. Time slowly becomes narrative, slowly becomes simple once more after that fleet childhood wherein time was a place for imagination to soar, where everything was relevant.
Memories develop later in life. These abstract images that carry from our earliest stage, with so many unrendered edges, as if childhood were seen through a kaleidoscope rather than a set of eyes. The pebble of the hopscotch would be in one place and then another, heaven would always move, and it was the heaven of movement, of location, of being in both space and time and knowing that we were in space and time, and that one minute could mean very little or everything in the world. Memories carve narrative, they carve these rough edges and make our feelings as they faded into the past and lost their relevance. For a child to pass through universal time and end up in a strange cultural human time, so different in so many places, there is this array of music, of unknown feelings that are swelling in an unknown place, without logic and without narrative. Children play time well; they understand that it is not the things that they have but the time they have, the space they have. That children burst forth out of time but somehow are conquered by the narrative arch of humanity, its wars, its censorship, its somehow rigid architectures both of landscape and thought.
I had intended to write about Cortazar's Hopscotch but this meant more tonight: we'll never be as young as we are tonight; mere assumption. Human culture brings us the concept of death, of finite time. We do not live in time, but in our cultural form of time, our conceptual time. Our society sculpts time in clocks that serve only delimiting purpose. Of course we are the millenarian societies, the societies that always anticipates end whether it's closing time or the apocalypse. Our form of time is not playful and we have expectations within it; cultural expectations. But this is not the time to explain. I intend to read some more of Charles Bukowski's Women then I will explain Hopscotch a little. Let me expand within my own time, be playful with it. Let me seize time and make my escape in words that are like so many specks of dust caught up in springtime afternoon. It took me time considerable to get through Hopscotch but it opened up the world in ways I only imagined, until I had words.
For myself, the novel serves the purpose of a strange craft illustrated with simple metaphors: the hopscotch of childhood and the pebble carved with purpose, being kicked towards heaven, and its parallels in a seemingly complex adult life that seeks purpose, but really seeks freedom of movement. This reminds me of my other writing that is less academic, even not at all. Those children's illustrations and simple metaphors with envelopes floating in the air, those peculiar images of clearness, of humor. The necessity of no style, of varied concepts, of dismantling narrative is so difficult in art; it is so difficult to convey something with depth to the critics, because the shape of life has already been managed into literature, into philosophy, into rigid meanings and non-fluid concepts. But for a child the notion of time is non-existent; it is carved into us with culture of a certain kind, and we are sculpted by expectations, by the story that is already in us as a species. Time slowly becomes narrative, slowly becomes simple once more after that fleet childhood wherein time was a place for imagination to soar, where everything was relevant.
Memories develop later in life. These abstract images that carry from our earliest stage, with so many unrendered edges, as if childhood were seen through a kaleidoscope rather than a set of eyes. The pebble of the hopscotch would be in one place and then another, heaven would always move, and it was the heaven of movement, of location, of being in both space and time and knowing that we were in space and time, and that one minute could mean very little or everything in the world. Memories carve narrative, they carve these rough edges and make our feelings as they faded into the past and lost their relevance. For a child to pass through universal time and end up in a strange cultural human time, so different in so many places, there is this array of music, of unknown feelings that are swelling in an unknown place, without logic and without narrative. Children play time well; they understand that it is not the things that they have but the time they have, the space they have. That children burst forth out of time but somehow are conquered by the narrative arch of humanity, its wars, its censorship, its somehow rigid architectures both of landscape and thought.
I had intended to write about Cortazar's Hopscotch but this meant more tonight: we'll never be as young as we are tonight; mere assumption. Human culture brings us the concept of death, of finite time. We do not live in time, but in our cultural form of time, our conceptual time. Our society sculpts time in clocks that serve only delimiting purpose. Of course we are the millenarian societies, the societies that always anticipates end whether it's closing time or the apocalypse. Our form of time is not playful and we have expectations within it; cultural expectations. But this is not the time to explain. I intend to read some more of Charles Bukowski's Women then I will explain Hopscotch a little. Let me expand within my own time, be playful with it. Let me seize time and make my escape in words that are like so many specks of dust caught up in springtime afternoon. It took me time considerable to get through Hopscotch but it opened up the world in ways I only imagined, until I had words.
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