The “spectral grapheme h” takes on its own spatiality because it enacts this separation. Howe is invested in exploring how James altered his cousin’s letters, took up her life for his fiction, so that now it seems as if we only have access to Minny through Milly. The unexpected gift of grace seems to alight in the figure of the dove that runs through this book, originating from Henry James’s cousin, Minny Temple, who died young and became the inspiration for Milly Theale in his novel, The Wings of the Dove. She calls it “the granting of grace in an ordinary room, in a secular time” (63). I’m curious about how this coolness, later called a “a wind or ghost of a wind” (13) relates to the close of the book when Howe invokes a kind of aura of poetry in the space of the research library. And repeatedly, the reader-figure that Howe describes loses her sense of agency, is led away from the obvious train of thought or path of research and into the margins, into the unexpected. The temperature or coolness, implying a smooth texture and comfortable space, belonging to the books is itself the subject of this sentence. Howe, in the opening pages of Spontaneous Particulars, writes: “A cool of books / will sometimes lead the mind to libraries / of a hot afternoon, if books can be found / cool to the sense to lead the mind away” (11). Telepathy (from the Greek tele and pathos, or distant meaning) implies the involuntary crossing of a thought within spatial relations of otherness it is the transfer of meaning without touch, without sensory involvement, and as such the seemingly necessary inverse of the kind of communication that happens within Bora or Sedgwick’s epistemology of texture. In her archival work, thoughts have their own kind of agency. Howe is drawn to what occurs on the edges of things-the marginal notes, the fragments, the doodles, the scraps of material-which turn the text at hand into a textile object. While Howe draws an explicit etymological link between text and texture, text as fabric, Hayward and Bora both write about communication that happens through a combination of the optic and tactile senses (both using variants of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘haptic’ space). Drawing on the previous blog post on spatialized relations of being beside, and anticipating slightly what I will discuss in my presentation tomorrow, I’m interested in how language is materialized in the readings for this week, particularly in Susan Howe’s book.
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