Fragments final

This is an essay about fragments and fragmentation. It is also an essay made, in a way, [[of fragments->Essay-in-fragments]], short scraps hitched by hyperlink. (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

This form, the essay-in-fragments, is as common as kudzu; and it's easy to see why. It is a wildly attractive form, beautiful when laid out on the page: lots of blank space. And if the fragments are numbered, the essay bears the solemn, [[orderly->Essay-in-fragments 2]] look of craftedness — looks //shopped.// (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

But its flow is anything but logical. Hodge-podged, the essay-in-fragments sprawls, mimicking the fickle distributions of a pachinko board, or, what we imagine is the rollick of a thought on the neuronal path. It [[//flits//,->Essay-in-fragments 3]] is it; is unpindownable. (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

The disjunct form of the essay-in-fragments joins similar forms — the //study in//, the //groundwork for//, the //notes towards//, and, more traditionally, the //prolegomena// — in an aesthetic of the tentative. (click-append: "tentative.")[Wary of arrogating space and (worse) of committing error, yet unable to quite contain themselves, these works take their place where saying is always edging back towards the [[likeable quiet->Essay-in-fragments 4]] of the unsaid.] (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

Fragments being propped on so much silence. (click-append: "so much silence.")[So many breaks in the text mean so many places to stop, either awhile (as in, to think), or once and for all (to leave the thing behind you). I will have done my piece if I give you the chance to do [[either one.->Begin]]] (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

Without delay. Click [[here->Fragmentation]] to begin the essay. Or click [[here->Bibliography]] for a list of the works that inspired and informed this essay. (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

This is an essay about fragmentation. (click-append: "fragmentation.")[In general, fragmentation describes the [[process->Fragmentation 2]] of breaking up an intact whole into parts.(text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]]

This process, fragmentation, may occur in any of many different ways. Roughly these ways divide into two types, which are fragmentation [[by hand->By hand]] and fragmentation [[out of hand->Out of hand]]. (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

For instance: anger (about the poor prospects of a work-in-progress), hatred (of the self who wrote the sorry thing), inattention or [[boredom->Selection]], forgetfulness. If not for [[art's sake->Essay frags]]. (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

For instance: flood damage, [[fire damage->Joyce]], fade (a kind of damage) in the sunlight; ink corrosion; physical erosion; and time, of course, the slow eroder of all. (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

One theory of how texts become fragments holds that fragments are, as much as created by writers, [[//selected for//->Francis Jeffrey]] by readers. The idea is that repeated readings of one or only a few parts of a longer and, more importantly, formally complete text will still leave standing those (and only those) parts that are interesting. The other parts we just won't bother with. Perish the whole: only the prettiest itty strings survive. (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

But why the fragment? And [[why so many fragments now?->Genealogy]] (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

In his tenure as editor of the //Edinburgh Review//, Francis Jeffrey (1773-1850) suggested that a certain "Taste for Fragments" percolating in the reading public would make it the fate of all texts, even complete and new-made texts, to be made fragmentary: (click-append: "made fragmentary:")[//The truth is, we suspect, that after we once know what it contains, [[no long poem is ever read->Francis Jeffrey 2]], but in fragments; and that the connecting passages which are always skipped after the first reading, are often so tedious as to deter us from thinking of a second.//] (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

The year 1908: as Richard Ellmann tells the story, a despairing James Joyce submitted the manuscript of //Stephen Hero// to the fireplace. His novel-in-progress, 901-page baby. (click-append: "901-page baby.")[Joyce's wife, Nora, and his sister stretch their hands into the flames and save the thing, [[383->Joyce 2]] of a total 901 pages remaining.(text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]]

The fragment in the practice of creative nonfiction functions, often, as something like a method of recuperating the self. It is a certain sign — it is nothing if not broken, after all — of the difficulty of achieving voice, the difficulty of cobbling stable selfhood out of a worldly experience that is defined by its near-total diffuseness and disrepair. (click-append: "diffuseness and disrepair.")[So, the act of writing emerges in counterpoint to this immanent state of tatters; writing becomes a way of repairing a damaged subjectivity, or of fabricating a new one — or of, at the least, making the disintegrated self [[at least interesting->Genealogy 2]] as such.] (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

Is //Stephen Hero// a fragment, then?(click-append: "a fragment, then?")[fragment, //Stephen Hero//?A whole did suffer damage, and a part did become detached. You'd concede as much.](click-append: "as much.")[If damage and detachment are all the attributes you require, qualitatively, of a fragment, then you'd concede that [[//Stephen Hero// is a fragment->And yet]].(text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]]

[[And yet.->383 pages]]

383 pages are nothing to shake a stick at, is what I would suggest. Let's be empirical about this: //Stephen Hero// is, if you hold it [[in your hands->383 pages 2]], a novel-sized object. (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

The //OED// defines //fragment (n.)// as "a (comparatively) small piece of anything." What remains of the work in question is small compared with the original, the 901-page manuscript. What remains can //not//, however, quite be described as a "comparatively small" literary work. (click-append: "literary work.")[It's also hard to deny that most of the narrative episodes in the extant //Stephen Hero// are complete, so that the experience of reading it is pretty much indistinguishable, phenomenologically speaking, from the experience of reading a totally undamaged novel.] (click-append: "a totally undamaged novel.")[In other words, this fragment's [[fragmentariness->Fragmentariness]] just cannot be perceived at every point.(text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]]

Which raises an important question. Does our understanding of the fragment demand that it be not only formally, but also [[aesthetically->130]], adequately fragment-like? (click-append: "fragment-like?")[Does a fragment need to really //look the part//, in other words: disjunct, [[lopped-off->Manet]], or [[unfinished->Mogontius tablet]], rather than, say, merely comparatively [[small->Miniature]] and detached from a whole?(text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]]

The text of Sappho's fr. 130 (arguably the most well known of hers) is widely referred to as both a poem and a fragment. Most recently it was collected in //If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho,// translated by Anne Carson. Ἔρος δηὖτε μ’ ὀ λυσɩμέλης δόνεɩγλυκύπικρον ἁμάχανον ὄρπετον (click-replace: "Ἔρος")[Eros] (click-replace: "δηὖτε")[(now again)] (click-replace: "μ’")[me] (click-replace: "δόνεɩ")[stirs] (click-replace: "ὀ λυσɩμέλης")[the melter of limbs] (click-replace: "Eros (now again) me the melter of limbs stirs")[Eros the melter of limbs (now again) stirs me —] (click-replace: "γλυκύπικρον")[sweetbitter] (click-replace: "ἁμάχανον")[unmanageable] (click-replace: "ὄρπετον")[creature who steals in] (click-append: "sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in")[Noteworthy is that, unlike many of Sappho's other fragments in the same volume, this one contains a complete, coherent image. More than that, it supplies the reader with all the linguistic material they'd need to //assimilate// the image to their understanding. The poem is, in other words, [[fully legible->130.2]].] (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

The painter Manet stood in the ceaseless data stream of 19th-century modern Paris and gave it back in boxes, lopped off. Like in [[//Masked Ball at the Opera//->Manet detail]], 1873. (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

It was around the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that associations between (1) the fragment as a nonfiction device and (2) the self as the given content of nonfiction. It was then that, as Joanna Eleftheriou observes, memoir saw a boom in the book market, all but blotting out other sub-genres of creative nonfiction. And //the essay// writ large became practically synonymous with personal writing. (click-append: "personal writing.")[But it was then, too, that the entire discipline of creative nonfiction gained a new kind of self-awareness, as John D'Agata, a young writer impatient to father a movement to call his own, more or less hurried "the lyric essay" into the heart of the field.] (click-append: "into the heart of the field.")[And there it remains. The lyric essay remains emblematic of the art of creative nonfiction because it //is//, in a lot of ways, just another word for creative nonfiction. It is always [[in the process of creating itself->Genealogy 3]], its task of self-definition, like the open-endedness of its form, never determined to end.] (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

I owe my affection for fragments to Maggie Nelson, her heartstring-pulling //Bluets//, and also to Ludwig Wittgenstein, his later works. What follows is a list of other works that inspired and informed the essay you are reading — either the essay, or the teaching on fragments that I've done this semester with my advisor in Experiments in the Essay, a creative nonfiction workshop that, together, we designed.(align: "==><==")[`* * *`]Adorno, Theodor. //Aesthetic Theory.// Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Balfour, Ian. "'The Whole is the Untrue': On the Necessity of the Fragment (After Adorno)." in //The Fragment: An Incomplete History//. Getty Research Institute, 2009. Carson, Anne (translator). //If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho.// Penguin, 2003. Carson, Anne. "The Life of Towns." in //Plainwater: Essays and Poetry.// A.A. Knopf: 1995. Cixous, Hélène. "Without End no State of Drawingness no, rather: The Executioner's Taking Off," translated by Catherine A.F. MacGillivray. in //Stigmata: Escaping Texts.// Routledge, 2005. Eleftheriou, Joanna. "Is Genre Ever New? Theorizing the Lyric Essay in its Historical Context." in //Assay Journal// 4.1. https://www.assayjournal.com/joanna-eleftheriou-is-genre-ever-new-theorizing-the-lyric-essay-in-its-historical-context.html. Fellner, Steve. "On Fragmentation." in //Bending Genre//, edited by Margot Singer and Nicole Walker. Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2013. Lichtenstein, Jacqueline. "The Fragment: Elements of a Definition." in //The Fragment: An Incomplete History//. Getty Research Institute, 2009. Janowitz, Anne. "The Romantic Fragment." in //Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture: A Companion to Romanticism,// edited by Duncan Wu. Wiley, 1997. Menkedick, Sarah. "Narrative of Fragments." in //The New Inquiry// (July 3, 2014). https://thenewinquiry.com/narrative-of-fragments/. Nochlin, Linda. //The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity.// Thames and Hudson, 1994. Schlegel, Friedrich. //Philosophical Fragments.// Translated by Peter Firchow. University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Singer, Margot. "Scaffolding, Hermit Crabs, and the Real False Document." in //Bending Genre//, edited by Margot Singer and Nicole Walker. Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2013. Sedgwick, Eve. //A Dialogue on Love.// Beacon Press, 1998. Sedgwick, Eve. "Queer and Now." in //Tendencies.// Duke University Press, 1993. Sontag, Susan. "Under the Sign of Saturn." in //Under the Sign of Saturn.// Vintage, 1982. Stein, Gertrude. "Composition as Explanation." https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69481/composition-as-explanation. Varley-Winter, Rebecca. //Reading Fragments and Fragmentation in Modernist Literature.// Sussex Academic Press, 2018. Ventzislavov, Rossen. "Fragments in Libeskind and Wittgenstein." in //Contemporary Aesthetics.// http://contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=652. Williams, William Carlos. "An Essay on Virginia." in //Imaginations.// New Directions, 1970. (text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

As if the fragment transcends matters of taste and even Jeffrey knows it. As if it emerges (and, mark it, under [[his very own hand->By hand]]) not a vogue, nor a problem of distraction, but a deep-abided habit of the mind. (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

Whether a given object does or does not //belong// in a Manet frame, or why, is hardly the question. The question is simpler than [[that->Manet 5]]: is it in or is it out. Like an automated train-car door. What Manet and metro have in common is the depersonalization of the ax. The givenness of the fact of cutting off. (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

[[<img src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D4NozdLW4AMyIDx.jpg" height="600" width="734">->Manet 2]]

[[<img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/%C3%89douard_manet_-_Masked_Ball_at_the_Opera.jpg" height="600" width="734">->Manet 2]]

[[<img src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D4No2kRXkAAX-Os.jpg" height="600" width="734">->Manet 3]]

Manet is commonly called a Realist; all his life, at least, he insisted on himself as such. But his use of frame gives a striking sense of arbitration, even manipulation. Idiosyncratic are his crops. Singular. [[Half-bodies->Manet detail 2]], disembodied [[legs, feet->Manet detail 3]], floating faces jut from just beyond the frame, as if uncertain that they belong. (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

Some critics associate Manet's method of cropping with the machined and instantaneous (one might say [[hasty->Manet 4]]) composition of photography, then a nascent art. Others suggest that he had a kind of fetish for hands and feet. (And in fact the painter had made several studies of hands and feet.) (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]]

The poet Stéphane Mallarmé, friend of Manet, gives what might be the most compelling and original interpretation: he compares Manet's "manner of cutting down pictures" with "the view I would see if I framed my eyes with my hand [[at any given moment->Manet 6]]." (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

See how a sentence that begins with the gravity of inquisition ("The truth is, we suspect...") shifts, by the second use of that royal "we," into the register of observational comedy, like //Have you ever noticed how we? Is it just me [[or is it?->Francis Jeffrey 3]] Don't we?// (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

needs finishing

The fullness of fr. 130's sense, its legibility, owes in part to the richness of each of its words — the three participles of the second line in particular — but also to the fact that, literally, the poem has a finished feel. In a text that is more pronounced in its fragmentariness, like the one numbered fr. 40,(align:"==><==")[(text-color: "red")[//but I to you of a white goatand I will pour wine over//]]the reader would be obliged to, in a sense, //escape// the text and imagine, or even write, a version of the poem as complete. They may even be obliged, to that end, to [[supply some->130.3]] of their own language. (click-append: "their own language.")[(And in fact, there is a practice among some readers of Sappho to "finish" her poems, Mad Libs-like.)(text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]]

It may be, then, that, in the most literal sense, [[an ancient fragment is an incomplete sentence.->Mogontius tablet]] (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

The //OED// defines //fragment (n.)// as "a part broken off or otherwise detached from the whole; a broken piece; a (comparatively) small detached portion of anything." (click-replace: "anything")[anything."One scholar, Jacqueline Lichtenstein, in what is either an extension or a paraphrase of the dictionary, offers her own definition of the fragment as "a solid, compact object [[one can touch->Smallness 2]]."(text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]]

More interesting than Lichtenstein's insistence that all true fragments are physical objects is her point, made in passing, that whatever counts as a fragment must be miniature enough to be described as "compact." According to Lichtenstein's principle, not merely small but [[handheld->Smallness 3]] is the fragment. (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

"To miniaturize is to make useless," writes Susan Sontag. "For what is so grotesquely reduced is, in a sense, liberated from its meaning — its tininess being [[the outstanding thing about it->Miniature 2]]." (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

1. The fragment, being small, tends also to appear unostentatious. (click-append: "unostentatious.")[2. Here's how. To be anything, to be in any kind of state, is to be between — Deleuze's theory of becoming says as much. To grow is to be //both// bigger than one was //and also// smaller than one is going to be.](click-append: "is going to be.")[3. What is already small thus has the intention of becoming even smaller, with enough luck disappear.](click-append: "disappear.")[4. To begin a line of thought and then to ax it, uncompleted, or to make a little way towards the point, and then digress, and digress again; to, in the end, offer up nothing but a mess of notes, studies, and other like gunk and //allow// the reader to figure out for their own part what it is that the mess has to say, that is — isn't it? — to try to grind the writing self into dust.](click-append: "into dust.")[5. Writing in fragments is self-abnegation. To write in fragments is to abnegate the writing self.](click-append: "abnegate the writing self.")[ No:](click-append: "writing self. No:")[To abnegate the self, writing.](click-append: "abnegate the self, writing.")[ No:](click-append: "self, writing. No:")[To [[abnegate the self in writing.->Austerity]](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]]

I am of that common mind, or so I believe it's a common mind, according to which (1) any form of consumption is harmful, and (2) "consumption" is just another word for [[involvement->Austerity 2]] — anything, anyone. To be is to be more harmful. (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

The name of this obsessive, suicidal conception of the self is austerity. (click-append: "austerity.")[It goes like this: You can never have minute enough an impact on the planet. Can never get rid of enough worldly things, nor avoid the need for more. Never be alone enough. Never disentangle from the dense webs of inter-[[being->Insular]], //that's how deep your tangling goes.// Can never, ever, render you, your body, or the needs that they share harmless.](click-append: "harmless.")[ Can't kill the body, either.](click-append: "Can't kill the body, either.")[ So then, what?](click-append: "what?")[[[You write?->You write]](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]]

You write. (click-append: "You write.")[Let's consider the natural situation of writing. Its solitude.](click-append: "Its solitude.")[ It is true, for one thing, that when you write, you likely write alone. Whatever else may change in the business of writing, this much should be true forever.](click-append: "true forever.")[ Furthermore, when you are writing, you are not speaking.](click-append: "you are not speaking.")[ (This is good.)](click-append: "(This is good.)")[ This way, you don't burden anyone with the strength of your demands, nor needs, nor upset them with what you say.](click-append: "what you say.")[ Nor — think of yourself, here — is there any of the pain of apology and equivocation.](click-append: "apology and equivocation.")[ It may even be that, as long as you are writing, you are not driving your car, or using single-use plastic, or eating red meat, or earning money, or shopping online, or thinking about where you can fly to next.](click-append: "next.")[ No, rather, it appears that when you are writing, there is nothing of this world but a wide-reaching waste of blank page.(text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]]

The dream of the fragment, like of Flat Earth, is that [[insular states are preservable->Austerity 2]], and finitude is expressed by space. That zero impact is possible. That there is such a thing as divestment. (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

In time, one inevitably becomes oneself. needs finishing

//At any given moment.// I like so much the suddenness of that motion — even, almost, the absence of any intention behind it. But then again. Wouldn't that same motion be, couldn't it be read as, a sign of defense? As if you'd hide parts of the view from yourself (or yourself from parts of the view) not out of "fancy" at all, as Mallarme suggests, but out of — //no no no no, [[too much->Austerity]], too much at once// — fright. (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

(text-color: "white")[a](text-color: "white")[a](font: "Playfair Display")[(css: "font-size: 160px;")[(text-color: "red")[FR](text-color: "white")[A](text-color: "red")[GM] (text-color: "white")[_](text-color: "red")[NTS]]] (font: "Playfair Display")[(css: "font-size: 48px;")[[[(reflections from a damaged art)->Start]]]]

Say that an ancient fragment is (in the simplest sense) an incomplete sentence. An artifact containing one or more incomplete sentences. (click-append: "incomplete sentences.")[From such a definition of the ancient fragment — call it // an uncompleted string of text on a material that is susceptible to damage// — it would have to follow that [[the meaning->Ancient fragment 2]] of any ancient fragment also is uncompleted. Or, better: //endlessly completable.//] (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

[[<img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Londinio_Mogontio.jpg" height="191" width="624">->Mogontius poem]]

(font: "Lato")[(css: "font-size: 20px;")[LONDINIO MOGONTIO]] (click-append: "LONDINIO MOGONTIO")[a cord of wood] (click-append: "a cord of wood")[ (no)] (click-append: "a cord of wood (no)")[ two] (click-append: "two")[ (no)] (click-replace: "a cord of wood (no) two (no)")[tin] (click-replace: "tin")[tallow cakes] (click-replace: "tallow cakes")[wool skeins] (click-replace: "wool")[sheep] (click-replace: "skeins")[skins] (click-replace: "sheep")[pig] (click-prepend: "pig skins")[purpled ] (click-replace: "purpled")[purple-dyed] (click-append: "purple-dyed pig skins")[ (no)] (click-replace: "purple-dyed pig skins (no)")[two armfuls' fish] (click-replace: "two armfuls' fish")[fishy belly] (click-append: "fishy belly")[ flayed in] (click-append: "flayed in")[ (no)] (click-replace: "fishy belly flayed in (no)")[ nurdles —] (click-append: "nurdles —")[ new life] (click-replace: "nurdles — new life")[no,] (click-replace: "no,")[ a money pot] (click-replace: "money")[moneyed] (click-replace: "pot")[poet] (click-replace: "moneyed")[honeyed] (click-replace: "honeyed")[honeysweet] (click-append: "honeysweet")[singing] (click-replace: "a honeysweetsinging poet")[PAYMENT] (click-append: "PAYMENT")[: goods delivered] (click-replace: "PAYMENT: goods delivered")[timeliness:] (click-append: "timeliness:")[ an arrow] (click-append: "an arrow")[ in the armpit] (click-append: "in the armpit")[of ax blades] (click-append: "ax blades")[ glinting in the] (click-append: "glinting in the")[sun's peaks] (click-append: "sun's peaks")[ painted a] (click-append: "peaks painted a")[pearl sky] (click-append: "pearl sky")['s likeness] (click-append: "sky's likeness")[a rose] (click-append: "a rose")[a leaf] (click-append: "a leaf")[a lede] (click-append: "a lede")[a loud on] (click-append: "a loud on")[water] (click-append: "water")[silk on] (click-append: "silk on")[bread] (click-append: "bread")[ I owe you] (click-append: "I owe you")[three sheep] (click-append: "three sheep")[ as repayment for] (click-append: "as repayment for")[those three sheep [[lost->Mogontius poem 2]]]

The other outstanding thing about anything miniature is that our responses to it will, more likely than not, blot out the thing itself. (click-append: "blot out the thing itself.")[ //Squee!// at a bunny and, see, the bunny flees.] (click-append: "flees.")[(Possible that what we think of fragments is [[greater than->Smallness]] what fragments //are//?] (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

(font: "Lato")[(css: "font-size: 20px;")[I lost them.]] (click-append: "I lost them.")[ That night it] (click-append: "That night it")[rained it would not stop raining (that said) I kept an eye on them] (click-append: "I kept an eye on them")[//I kept an eye on them// but diaphanes they seemed to me the scared wet sheets] (click-append: "scared wet sheets")[(no) sheep. Witness of the world's saddled sore we made for shelter — then flew into] (click-append: "then flew into")[that waste of vision edging in sound- soft a sudden jowly thing] (click-append: "jowly thing")[ //believe me//as the smug angel afours slunk easy through the thickness of the sedge like] (click-append: "thickness of the sedge like")[light motes sailing in a silk screen, like in a milken dream my unable eyes curdled wet baby] (click-append: "curdled wet baby")[brain looking blind little fools, the fold, to what unfurls now in the murk, a scythe's curve] (click-append: "scythe's curve")[— a catenary.] (click-append: "— a catenary.")[ To be is to be between:] (click-append: "To be is to be between:")[On the one hand, the claw is contained by hold-me-close, this body.] (click-append: "this body.")[On the other — we named it //the contingent// — the claw's tip rimes the planed air ceaseless looking] (click-append: "ceaseless looking")[for a //sortie//, any way out of here any [[tearable seam —->Ancient fragment]]] (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]]

The engine of the lyric essay never stops. Movement is, in some ways, the only thing that defines the essay at all. (click-append: "defines the essay at all.")[William Carlos Williams suggests as much. The essay, according to him, is identified by its form, not its content; and its form, moreover, is defined by interleaving moments of clash and of stillness. The essay just //moves,// and that's it.] (click-append: "and that's it.")[Yet Williams never goes farther than to say //that// the essay moves — hardly a word on //how//. He points, in passing, to an alternative root of the art in the verb //assay//, to establish trial. Which suggests that the essay's movement, for Williams, is the movement of ideas in opposition to each other.] (click-append: "in opposition to each other.")[Here's what I'd offer, instead: the movement of the lyric essay is in its exchange with other, older, the genres of pedigree from which it is always, always filching its methods.] (click-append: "always filching its methods.")[To //assay// is, after all, also "to try by touch; to 'feel' by handling." As Sarah Menkedick puts it, the lyric essay is characteristically "composed of [[bits->Miniature]], fragments, collagistically compiled and accumulated."] (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

The Mogontius fragment, for instance, includes a locative-ablative (LONDINIO), which conveys information about place, and a dative (MOGONTIO) expressing, in this case, an indirect object. [[Missing->Ancient fragment 3]] is the direct object that would complete the grammatical string, and, hence, the thought that that string would express. (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

The thing about that direct object slot is that it is itself open to endless substitutions. (click-append: "endless substitutions.")[cord of wood (no) tin — tallow cakes] (click-append: "tallow cakes")[(align: "<======")[Ceaseless meanings out of that [[quiet space->Ancient fragment 4]].]] (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

One might object to the ahistoricism of that claim, of course; say that not just //any// object will do to complete the Mogontius fragment. Or any fragment, for that matter. (click-append: "for that matter.")[One might have noticed that my completions of the Mogontius fragment include a number of anachronisms, like //nurdle//, a plastic pellet.] (click-append: "a plastic pellet.")[To dismiss any completion as ahistoricist, or as otherwise "incorrect," I'd suggest, is to basically deny that the fragment has a linguistic as well as an artifactual life. Is the sentence [[//as well as//->Ancient fragment 5]] the thing that the sentence is written on.] (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

What I'm interested in, here, is the act of writing that happens in response to the fragment. Its nature and kind. (click-append: "Its nature and kind.")[Any possible completion (hence, any possible meaning) of a fragment is defined only in relation to other, equally possible completions — to the possibility that there is always one other.] (click-append: "always one other.")[And none is verifiable as "correct;" that's the thing. The fragment becomes, instead, a base for a never-ending exchange of linguistic elements: "fish" becomes "fishy belly" becomes, by conceptual associations, "nurdles," since fish ingest huge amounts of nurdles; and "nurdles" becomes, in turn, "new life" — an easy alliteration.] (click-append: "an easy alliteration.")[It could go on forever like that. There is a kind of continuous present tense enacted on the fragment: the act, begun — of writing, of Mogontius giving — is [[interminable; always->Writing: a forever thing]] in the state of not having been completed.] (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]

The next question I can't answer for you: [[why should writing be a forever thing?->You write]] (text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](text-color: "white")[p](align: "==>")[(text-color: #C0C0C0)[[[(home)->Title]]]]