FigFigs

The figurative—as in a figure of speech. I sometimes want to use speech like clay, as if my breath would act like my hands—the way my hands knead clay.

As in a figure of speech—I want a body to appear, but not any body. I want an ideal body—one with chiaroscuro.

An ideal body— with words to one side, like a dark shadow. The shadow in speech like the shadow of death.

Dante says the shadow of death lays in hell, only—and no other place. It is not the other place— that the shadows are, and that is significant, for Dante and us. It is significant for two reasons 1) Shadows are a part of life, though life and death don’t mix, and 2) Because it leaves open a space between life and death, or you can say, language and the body respectively—we’ll use Dante as reference again: we’ll call that place Purgatory. There is life and death– body and language– and they contrast and neither mix. But Purgatory, what can we say or touch here? (What did Beckett detect in Belacqua? in Purgatory?)

Purgatory: Limbo, the between—that between chattering and a body. Ah, and again, the place between torment and a heavenly body: they are both some sort of existence.

The place between existence—but place is not place in Purgatory. It is sheer movement neither up or down—at least for some. We leave Dante behind, and his classical concept of teleology, for the simple reason that, to me, it takes too long. Neither up or down, sheer movement—Hegel would say, maybe, it could be called Real Appearance, as in Force, which if we remember, Force was a chapter short of the tragedy when Consciousness fell into Self-Consciousness. A chapter as part of a triptych—a chapter short of Consciousness falling into Self-Consciousness? One part triptych– unconnected. Purgatory as a chapter, one part triptych—not just a place holder, not something Really necessary—but it remains necessary. An analogy might go: “It’s like one board missing in a fence, or a link missing in a chain. But there is no chain, and there is no fence—there is only board, there is only link.”

An island in the figure of speech—what part body, what part speech is this figure?

I don’t know.