Post 34: What is so good about the same stripe in different sizes?

Here is(are) the aforementioned stripe(s).

The "what":

What if this title was instead the first line? (If it was right over there instead of where the question about it is.) Or also the first line. What if that? How closely placed is an answer to its question?

As an addition (an addition before there is even much of a beginning), I want to mention that I recently listened to Anne Carson give a talk called "Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind." She more or less started with, and continued to return to, a question Roland Barthes wrote in an essay about the painter Cy Twombly: "How to make a line that is not stupid?"

I’m pleased by the path this question takes up. The movement it in turn takes on. It has a very specific direction: How do you move away from stupid? A "how do you leave somewhere?" instead of "how do you get somewhere?" Curiously, I hear the rhythm of this question in a similar way to how I hear the question I set out in this post: 

What is so good about the same stripe in different sizes?

How to make a line that is not stupid?

What     stripe     sizes

maps onto

How     line    stupid

In seeing this, I’m beginning to feel that my question approaches from a place that approximates the opposite side of the coin from that which the Roland Barthes question approaches. Mine asks: What makes something stay where it is (in good)?, while his asks: How can you avoid going somewhere (a place that is stupid)? Just approximate opposites, not exactly so. Partly because a "what" question isn’t as directional as a "how." A "how" moves from one place to another--significant transportation--whereas a "what" moves in a way that is only a backing up a few steps to see where you already are.

I’ve become interested in continuing to compare (pair up) these questions, but I fear I’ll never get to talking about the stripes if I do so. This is what would be so different about putting the stripe question in the first line as opposed to the title slot--I wouldn’t feel the necessity of needing to respond to it. (How fully is a title a setting of terms?) I’m not normally writing outward from a starting point that is a title I have in mind, but I suppose I have been writing outward from questions I have in mind. (Why make these starting point questions the titles? How do titles and questions differ as starting points?) Then again, I have mentioned before my interest in a post (in writing, generally) that never gets to the place that’s at the end of the path it initially sets out on. This reminds me of another Roland Barthes line--about forgetting. In the sense that never getting around to the place you’re setting out toward is a form of forgetting: "Forgetting meaning is not a matter for excuses, an unfortunate defect in performance; it is an affirmative value, a way of asserting the irresponsibility of the text, the pluralism of systems . . . it is precisely because I forget that I read."1

In this way, not arriving isn’t a lack, but is, or could be, an incorporation of the quality of absence.

//

The "so good":

This designation--"so good"--is one that holds a lot of strength for me. (Strength feels like meaning and meaning feels like worth.) "So" and "good" are each excessively frequent words, their combination just as frequent, but despite this, or no, maybe because of this commonality of usage, there’s a satisfying ease that gives their pairing the meaning I hold it to have here. (I’m interested in when quantity [usage] has an intensifying effect, rather than a diminishing one.) "So good" is a term I think of as being spoken out loud, and this association makes the written form of it land unexpectedly. Does its written existence just feel like a transcription of its verbal one? I mostly can hear "so good" as a reaction--a response--and in this way, it stands alone, without the cushion of any other words. Its frequency in speech combined with its not-as-familiar occurrence in writing gives it an absent flavor in the written form--again, this memory of the verbal. But, though, wait . . . when I talk about this stripe situation being "so good"--the so good stripe situation that I set out to say some things about in this post--is the "so good" here one that is spoken or written? I'm writing it, but I'm writing it from the origin point of the so-good-stripe-feeling existing in my mind. Where does a mental "so good" fit into all of this? It feels as though I am referring to a somewhere-else form of the stripes, and can’t recall exactly where or what that is.

There’s something (have I ever mentioned that "there’s something" is a favorite phrase of mine for it being a way to put down words when you can’t actually describe what’s going on? [another action that is an incorporation of absence]) I find more meaningful, of greater significance in "so good" than in a supposedly more effusive adjective--"incredible," or "remarkable"--in my feeling that "so good" is closer to the ground. (What is the ground for words? It’s something like the place where words are bestowed with meaning--from which they can jump up into sentences, or other settings as such. [Sentences take place in the air?]) This close-knit ground relationship makes the term "so good" deeper, wider, built with a stronger foundation (in contrast to a word like "remarkable" which is always more precarious--higher off like ground like higher heeled shoes). I can hear "so good" as imbued with a warmth from the nature of how it usually gets spoken. Perhaps it naturally gets heard within writing because of sound being its more common form, its home. Its resonance is firm and solid (higher-off-the-ground remarks all sound squeakier). 

Though, a question I really wonder about: is it easy to flip expectations--to reverse the typical roles of things in this way? To say I actually think low is better than high? (And is this to be saying that high is low and low is high?) What is the interest or truth in reversing these positions? But, I also consider the possibility that what is happening here isn't a true reversal. I may just be properly equating low with low--goodness (this quality level) with two black and white stripes (the sensation these bring about). Wouldn't it instead be a reversal to equate something like "magnificent!" (it’s hard to tell what adjective is worth making an example of) with these stripes? What of the fact that I haven’t even gotten to the stripes yet? This may seem like a high-low reversal in the sense that it hasn’t yet fully been made clear that I’m applying "so good" to much of anything. Yes in the title, but then again, I mentioned my interest in unreliable titles.

Right here, the initial question of "What is so good . . ." transforms into "Why is 'so good' the right phrase for what is being called out about the two stripes?"

What is the feeling when words are the right size and shape for the subjects they’re being applied to?

//

Not forgetting: The "stripe(s)":

Up until right now has been the journey to the arrival of the stripes. Right now is the arrival at the stripe situation. Words are charting time.

What’s immediately exciting about this situation is that it is in fact a situation. (Sometimes life is wonderful in this way.) A situation feels like a scenario that includes something not entirely straightforward. The stripe couple presents as a question: is it one stripe in two different forms and sizes or two stripes that have much in common? That could be a core seed of the interest here--the not knowing, the perhaps there being equal ways that this stripe is both one and two. There is clearly one sock and one scarf, but the stripe is something that has been imposed on each of these things; it is what is in question of being singular or multiple as it doesn’t have existence boundaries in the way the sock and the scarf do. The intangible stripe forms a question of these two tangible items.

One thing that’s so good (which is a nice reminder that this post is about stripes being so good and behold, here is the first instance of this) is the swift interaction between the differently-sized stripes. Swift in that their similar appearances make the interaction happen quite immediately--the one stripe quickly introduces itself to the other, and the other stripe simultaneously floats onto the initial one. Despite swift, the interaction itself is crunchy, as though an enjambment. How is this interaction like the mapping of my question onto Barthes's, as mentioned previously? I think of this as querying the nature of partial similarity. (A rhythm?)

What is so good about the same stripe in different sizes?

How to make a line that is not stupid?

~

What makes the stripes stay in good?

How do they avoid going somewhere stupid?

The stripes have points of alignment with each other just like the bolded words in the two questions. Sometimes, the black lines line up (have the same starting point) and sometimes the white lines do. It’s hard to say if the stripes feel more like they are holding themselves back from combining, or as though they have each just helped the other out of the stickiness of combination. (Here is the difference between staying somewhere and avoiding somewhere.) In neither fully separating out into two individual stripes, nor coalescing into one, they each persist in keeping the other on its toes.

There’s something nice about how the twoness of the stripes most comes into focus with both of these striped objects being in the same space. The closer similar items get, the more different they appear. This feels obvious, but why? Especially here, it's not that the level of difference is expanding because more details are coming into focus, and that there are actually more differences in looking at these separate things up close. It's just that side by side, each thing is made more itself. This is what I wonder about the why of. In separate shots--in imagined separate photos--they are a sock and a scarf all the same, but the differences in the stripe that they share feels less significant. (In that situation, the objects wouldn't ask to be compared, so they wouldn't be.) But in this shared space, the pairing of these striped objects is what creates a formal arrangement of differennce. Proximity becomes a method of drawing a distinction between two of "the same thing" and allowing each one to function as a ruler up against the other. It’s a way for the sock stripe and the scarf stripe to be different and the same simultaneously. To lock and unlock with each other.

Concludingly: How do two things slide into and crunch against one other?

Notes:

1 Roland Barthes, "S/Z" in S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1974), 11.

Bibliography: 

Roland Barthes, "S/Z" in S/Z, translated by Richard Miller, 11. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1974.