Pure Texture: an internet book [under construction]

Chapter one, "On reading" [draft] by Patrick Simpson

Reading is repetition. In the act of reading, one repeats what is written in the text in the virtual space of the mind.

In this essay, I want to ask: how can we learn to read better?

I will make a strong claim, intended to be widely-encompassing: reading better means cultivating a "slowness" that entails, as a nondual, paradoxical "quasi-cause", what is more truly a "fastness", an increase in the "speed" of one's "becoming", following Deleuze's reading of Spinoza's philosophy as an "ethology of speeds" [note: quote is from ATP, I think; need to find source].

We must distinguish between the "better" reading, which is the "slower" one (and, consequently, the more spacious and powerful one), and what I will call "naive reading". "Naive reading" is akin to what Buddhists term "naive realism". Naive reading takes the readings that are given in immediate sensuous experience not as readings, but rather as unconsidered "objective" facts. The naive reader says to themselves (without knowing they are saying this), "what I see and feel is what is real; I see a tree by the side of the road and know it is a real tree."

We have a tendency to identify with the voice---with our language, the thing that says "I". As Rimbaud wrote, however, "I is an other." Often, in social life, we are exposed to the Jungian "shadow" of ourselves in the other: we assume the other sees the reality of what the "I" has repressed, which is this "otherness" of the self to itself. It matters a great deal to recognize what we identify with and through our language---the qualities we ascribe to the "I", this "I" that cannot stop itself from speaking---because those positive qualities tend to become shadows in the mirroring gaze of the other we recognize as recognizing us. Naive reading takes the shadows as real shadows (and, likewise, takes as real the statues of Goodness (eg, Justice, Knowledge, Strength) which cast them). The "fastest", most powerful "reading"---one that is ultimately inaccessible---is one that makes of light itself a darkness, and vice versa. Standing in noontime brightness and knowing that it is at the same time a moonless midnight, or the other way around.

We must let the otherness of the world speak itself---fill dumb and blind absence with this presence of meaning, regarding the world and the beings in it as endlessly vocal and expressive (one must look and give language where one does not immediately read it: read the birds as each speaking themselves, each in their own particularity; and the same for the rocks, and the trees, and the stars above and the fires in the distance (across the water); the same for the grasses by the river, each "leaf of grass"; more: each eddy in the coursing water)---and then, as a paradoxical doubling-back that does not sublate contradictions but merely expands differential powers (following Deleuze's critique of the Hegelian negative in Difference and Repetition), we must regard this potent polyvocality as, in the end, silent.

Listening for an ultimately silent symphony. This means letting the otherness of our own language---in speech, in writing, and in the "pre-speech", "Joycean tumble" of the mind's stream of consciousness (to borrow a DFW phrase)---speak itself as other. To hear this ceaseless streaming of language in thought and speech not as "me" speaking but rather as "something", the otherness of the "I", speaking itself in me; the other turn, then, is to recognize this otherness as more truly a univocality, a "two-in-one"-ness that is only ever, in the end, One, and in doing so, dissolve the chattering. Always "both directions at once", to borrow a phrase from Deleuze's Logic of sense (also the title of a Coltrane album): but with the very important recognition that this is not, in the end, a mirroring relation, but merely a differential one. There is no recognition of one by the other, and there need not be. Speech, writing, language: conceptual "proliferation", as described in Buddhist philosophy: this is an excess that is not opposed to but merely limited by the ultimate silence of the other.

Reading the world in this way---letting its otherness speak itself in language, and then effacing the polyvocality of that language in a univocal silence---is captured in Gerard Manley Hopkins' "As kingfishers catch fire."

Consider the universe as a vast "open archive", like Borges's "Library of Babel," but one in which one is also, themselves, only ever another silent book on one of the shelves: there are no "librarians", no living masters of the archive. Know that this is the ultimate silence. Then, look around the library and read the other books; venture far and wide. See the silent shelves; speak them into being in the mind through the act of reading. One must curate one's reading: must maintain the silence of not just some of, but almost all of the books ("if we had a keen vision and feeling for all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow, and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence." --Eliot, Middlemarch). But yes, still, one must read, even as one recognizes the infinite smallness of this reading.

Read books. Let those voices actualize themselves. And then, in that act of reading, simultaneously hear the absence, the silence, of all of those voices speaking: some seeming to directly contradict each other, most only ever "rubbing up against" each other, as it were. As one reads this polyvocality, one traverses many affective thresholds: there is an energetic friction to it. One must hear the voices very clearly---allow them to speak themselves fully---to then be able to hear, in and through those voices, what is always, in the end, unspoken and silent: meaning that is absent, ceaselessly deferred (in the sense of a Derridean death of metaphysics). I must read, eg, Deleuze, Woolf, Dostoevsky and read them as always, in the end, silent to me; there is a vast difference, here, between the silence of reading the book, and the silence of not knowing how to read. I have to regard the words inside those books as absolutely necessary: hear the voices as my own; then, recognize that this "alien presence" (Wolfgang Iser's term, from The Implied Reader: I should have cited him earlier) that I have allowed to speak in my mind is only ever, in the end, my own (non)-presence in language.

"I is an other": the praxis is to allow the alien otherness of the language of the text (whatever it may be: both literal books and all beings can be regarded as "texts") to fully inhabit the space of the mind (and in doing so, widen that space of the mind)---to use a cliche, it's about putting oneself in the other's shoes, letting their voice fill the space normally taken up by a habitual egoic voice. In doing so, one learns to become the consciousness of the other---allows for a rearrangement of symbolic ordering according to how that consciousness speaks itself and its own reading of the world---and only through this process of reading do we eventually come to hear the true silence. There is a vast difference---perhaps all the difference in the world---between hearing this "silence" in the act of reading itself and refusing to read, or not knowing how to read. The former---hearing the silence---is to inhabit the consciousness of the text so fully that what was "alien" becomes indistinguishable from the egoic self, rendering the otherness of the text silent and thus endlessly repeatable. It is to read Don Quixote and become so immersed in its world and how it speaks itself that one transitions from merely reading it to writing it: Pierre Menard's ultimately impossible task is to perfectly repeat the voice constructed by Cervantes in this way. Cervantes himself would not have been able to achieve this: as soon as Don Quixote was written, it was already "other", even (perhaps especially) to him.

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