SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 37
SINE QUA NON
long time to come; they contain descriptions of the way of all flowers that inspired generations
of writers dedicated to endowing words with the power of music and the majesty of silence.
The imagination must create flowers and imbue them with a fleeting perfection amidst the
transience of life. To the mind, an aesthetically perfect landscape appears as if made by a genie
from a magic lamp, while “my heart on a swing touches the sky.”3
It could be that I am reducing the act of cautious reading to sensational misreading and
turning the impersonal gaze into the interpersonal look, with me as reader playing the role
of the creator, on an elaborate stage that I envisioned for myself. The interpersonal aspect
involves ‘me’ conversing with ‘myself ’ about ‘myself,’ akin to a child listening to an adult
argument without being aware of the curious audience nearby. Is it narcissism, self-indulgence
without a hint of irony, or a pursuit of pleasure that distracts one from reality in order to live
in imagined situations? And how do I refer to those situations: as places or as spaces?
Perhaps place is space, and people are creatures that dwell in time or outside of it, as they
sometimes do in dreams.
What about the ‘nature,’ the flowers, we talk about in things? For a definition of nature
that encompasses neither space nor place, or both, I quote Blaise Pascal from his Pensées:
“Nature is an infinite circle whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere.”4
There is la jouissance, or the bliss, of ‘misreading’ the text, an infinite circle like nature, “whose
center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere.”5 That’s what an interpersonal reading
is about: oscillating between a mobile center and an invisible circumference of a text. I use
a text against its complementary or imagined context to create a “pre-text” for an alternative
reading.
The pre-text is both what comes before the text and an excuse for misreading it.
The narrative is a source of creative misreading, which means that a close reading of
the text is as important as situating the text within a social, political, and historical context.
Contexts, by default, have a tendency to be interpretations. Contextualizing or interpreting a
text or a segment of a text is about establishing a relationship between you and the ‘original’
text. It is about detecting the text's central point, which is everywhere and nowhere. It is
also about experiencing the ‘la’ of jouissance—the feminineness—or the pressing need for
rejection of a stable ‘masculine’ center at the heart of misreading.
In Shakespeare's play, Hamlet grapples with the dilemma of whether to be or not to be;
as a character, he, like any individual, is consumed by his own thoughts about the world. At
any given moment, we are expected to both express our feelings confidently and to accept that
words cannot express everything. We could restate Hamlet's dilemma as a problem of thought
attempting to overtake language, like how cyclonic rain overwhelms the river, sending it into
a wild spate. Hamlet wants words to say everything or nothing; it has to be either a flood or
a famine. The problem lies in how Hamlet thinks about language in relation to the world of
his thoughts.
Hikmet, “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved.”
Blaise Pascal, Pensées and Other Writings, trans. Honor Levi (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press,
2008), 66.
5
Pascal, 66.
3
4
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