Provenance, origin, production. Tracking floaters appears in my vision at around the same time as [b:The Invention of Glass|13581799|The Invention of Glass|Emmanuel Hocquard|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1333757564s/13581799.jpg|19167283] by [a:Emmanuel Hocquard|9921|Emmanuel Hocquard|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1236741568p2/9921.jpg]. In my left eye, a mote lags persistently behind the rightward flow and the left- and downward jerk of my focus. At SPD, books arrive in boxes, cut them open with box cutters. The cut is the violence that precedes vision, that precedes the big reveal. The Invention of Glass reveals the organicity of semiotics & grammer. As Hocquard puts it:

The letters are
P. 82 Here, the ampersand (&) is not a replacement for and. Rather, it denotes a tautological aim. Which is to say that it tends to mark, between two terms, a relationship (but can we still speak of a relationship?) or identity: “Table & hands” (p. 10), “Person & path” (p. 86), or indifferentiation, closer to or. You could also say augmentation. “The painting shows Alvina's photographed arms augmented by a shoulder as if it's a birth...” (p. 55) is less the description of an image than the development of a formula such as “Alvina's arm & shoulder” while the other formula “Alvina's arm and shoulder” denotes an addition (113)

Relationship or identity, indifferentiation, augmentation. “Despite orders,/words like bodies/communicate among themselves/by capillary action...” (64). The differentiation contained within Hocquard's indifferention is, I believe, from cellular differention, “the process by which a less specialized cell becomes a more specialized cell” ("Cellular differentiation." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 29 March 2012. Web. 6 April 2012). The prefix in has many functions, so it is possible to think of an inverted differentiation, in which a higher order complexity shifts to a lower order as well as continuous lateral slide of meaning.

The above note about the ampersand comes from the second major section of the book, entitled “Story”. The other is “Poems”, an archive made up of “columns of white steam”, “variations between dark/and light” (41). Interesting Hocquard's mention of formula, as there are many gestures towards a science of the reactive; atoms and molecules helplessly swapping electrons; biology's messy, ordered interchange of organic material. Language, for Hocquard, is a fantasy that coexists uneasily with bodies which resist it with all their force. This is a poetry that resists not calculation, but the naivete of calculation. My friend Maya asked, as so many have and will continue to ask, “What's the difference between (poetic) image & act ?”. Hocquard: “Light under water/is no wetter/than on land...” (87-88). ( )