in the margins

Posted by Daniela Elza on Mar 07 2007

I enjoyed reading the current and a few back issues of west coast line. Here are a few quotes that revolve around each other in my mind. I am as usual attracted to the gravitational pull of the search for the self.

Roy Kiyooka says:

discourse, as I find myself engaged in it, is a continuous act of improvisation. the quest seems to be “in-sight,” into the thots [sic] & acts of one’s life. furthermore, my notion of discourse includes photography & such music as I can make. it’s a whole complex of inter-related acts including wit, laughter, & silences.” (Pacific Rim Letters 138)

(from Roy Kiyooka: from Eminence to Immanence, by Daphne Marlatt in west coast line 45, p. 44)

In the same piece Daphne Marlatt writes:

“The crumbling and constant shifting of the self, permeates the difficulty of that quest he [Roy Kiyooka] mentioned. Self-hood not as a solid entity, but something immanent in the very play of the particulars of the local, in their mutuality of being and the necessary recognition of it.” (p. 45)

Cathy Stonehouse in her piece “If you get me out of here I will show you something: a confession in praise of the “dreaming disease” (west coast line 44, p.114) writes:

“To glimpse Paradise, then, is to facilitate the coming together of fragments, broker a truce between alienated selves. Similarly, perhaps all writing is utopian in impulse, for to write is to dream that words recorded on a page exist in a timeless dimension, a city let’s say, where all lived experience co-habits, a metropolis of human integrity. To conjure this city is to presume that learning from history is possible. Personally I would like to believe that all individuals no matter how damaged or oppressed, have the power to enter that magnificent city, to find their way into that borderless landscape. I would like to believe that all marginalized people have the capacity, through art, to dream themselves real.”

Is our idea of the self like our idea of the electron? Is it a noun, a dot we can draw on paper, or is it more a verb, a cloud of possibility?

So, what were you dreaming of today? And what will that make of you (and the world around you) tomorrow?

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