I, Of The Swarm

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Notes

notes

1 The poet Alan Loney made this point in an address to Writing Before and Beyond the Image students at the University of Melbourne, 26 April 2007.

2 Just as the word for chance, le hasard, is only a dice throw away – in the Arabic, chance/hazard is also the word for the dice game. As Mallarmé's great late poem was to show, in the space of a tautology (Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard; a dice throw will never abolish chance or to put it more simply: a dice throw will never abolish the dice game), burrowed into etymology is all the difference in the world (see Kristeva).

3 “Je t’apporte l’enfant d’une nuit d’Idumée” (Mallarmé, “Don du Poème” in Œuvres 40).

4 Lire – Cette pratique – Appuyer, selon la page, au blanc, qui l’inaugure son ingénuité, à soi, oublieuse même du titre qui parlerait trop haut: et, quand s’aligna, dans une brisure, la moindre, disséminée, le hasard vaincu mot par mot, indéfectiblement le blanc revient, tout à l’heure gratuit, certain maintenant, pour conclure que rien au-delà et authentiquer le silence. (Mallarmé, Œuvres 386–87)

5 Also called “Sonnet allégorique de lui-même”/“Self-allegorising sonnet” (Mallarmé, “Plusieurs sonnets IV” in Œuvres 68–69).

6 “And I / Am the arrow, / The dew that flies, / Suicidal, at one with the drive / Into the red / Eye, the cauldron of morning” (Plath 36–37).

7 Used in the Freudian sense, pointing to the unconscious motivations of forgetting the context of an utterance or event, and then later recovering the memory as if it were a product of one's own imagination. I would contest that were cryptamnesia not at work, one could scarcely write, finding at every turn the warning signals of plagiarism flashing.

8 He was met with the attitude: stop carrying on about the Holocaust and anti-Semitism; all our high school students can recite “Death Fugue” (see Felstiner).