⮞The Tyranny of Explanation - reflections on The Witch (2015)
⮞The White Horse Always Finds His Rider - reflections on The Founder (2016)
⮞Bonanzaland Dies With a Whimper - reflections on No Country for Old Men (2007)
“Remains to be Seen” is a personal website where I host my writing and a (though I am loathe to use the word) “curated” index of external links to websites I feel are worth linking to. My writing follows and will follow no central focal point or schema; it is a loosely organized body of writing and text with no further unifying purpose. It is very small at the time of writing, and there's not a lot of use on dwelling on this question before "it" is anything to speak of. I appreciate your patience (I am always saying).
I thought the two glosses of the phrase "remains to be seen" that occurred most readily to me related to one another in a satisfying way. The first gloss is to me the most ready-at-hand (and the generally more recognized) one, where “remains” is a verb the subject of which is some thing that has not occurred yet or at least is not as yet detectable: "it remains to be seen". An alternate reading takes “remains” as a grammatical object, a noun of something reduced to the status of evidence, the thing which it is evidence of being absent, and which will and/or is intended to be observed: "there are remains to be seen".
I reject the category of authenticity[2] almost completely and find the interrogation of its presence, particularly with respect to art, to be a special hobby horse of the slow and dull-witted who would prefer to spend their leisure time measuring crania and trying to nail shadows to the ground. Its generally immaterial to me how authentic (the content of) an art object is, or how authentically it was composed, in much the same way that it is immaterial to me how authentically the plumber installed the commode or how authentically my ass shits in it. The concern for authenticity in poetry and a lot of other writing, the valuation of what is sometimes misnomered as a "voice," is a reflex that I think can be helpfully described as the vistigial organ developed from the trauma of capitalist imposition of the commodity fetish form onto language. The second, related to the first: as the troublesome and figuratively manifest homunculous whose supportors and detractors alike call "autonomous man."
1. A matter of topology as opposed to identity. 2. Like that of a mirror.
[1] Heading sequence lifted from “The Book of Mormon,” a prefatory pamphlet historically included in copies of the eponymous book of scripture.
[2] By which I do not mean either honesty or "truth," but rather an orientation towards authority/authorship.
