O Rise ye Archers of Syntaxiom!

Shozo Shimamoto, Indicators, 1953, ink on paper

More on arrows..

Having recently been thinking along similar lines, myself, I thought I would post an echoic textual accompaniment to John Latta's post on the thematic of Arrows. John seems of late of late to be making a case for a criticism of quatations ala Benjamin, etc. For my part, I find the arrow's contiguity snugly apropos within my own system / hobby-horse of syntaxis, lately semiotics (semiosis), which has that Joycean / Beckettian ironical shadow, namely, seemiotics, or for the contemporary scene "see-me-otics" which has its own series of targets and woundings, etc. I must say it's a theme close to my heart, but hopefully not too close. Maybe instead of a "criticism of quotations," I'll say my own example performs something closer to a topological flow vector sampling of historical poesis and related enrvirons..

The Arrow and the Song

I shot an arrow into the air,

It fell to earth, I knew not where;

For, so swiftly it flew, the sight

Could not follow it in its flight.

I breathed a song into the air,

It fell to earth, I knew not where;

For who has sight so keen and strong,

That it can follow the flight of song?

Long, long afterward, in an oak

I found the arrow, still unbroke;

And the song, from beginning to end,

I found again in the heart of a friend. 

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

==

From Tony Hoagland's Arrows

the fascinating spectacle

    of his own body

                     bristling with arrows;

he looks up

as if he were already adamantly elsewhere,   

    exerting that power of denial

         the soul is famous for,

that ability to say, “None of this is real: (...)

==

In one way an arrow moves, in another way the mind. The mind indeed,

both when it exercises caution and when it is employed about inquiry,

moves straight onward not the less, and to its object.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

from The Arrow of Love: Optics, Gender, and Subjectivity in Medieval Love Poetry

 By Dana E. Stewart

I thought this next example required a more hefty selection. Here is Jon Clay's Sensation, Contemporary Poetry and Deleuze: Transformative Intensities

line from an old su'luk poem..

from Blake's Jerusalem..

Zoa? So miraculously like loa and zoe combined, so too, a perfection of semiotics and occultism made poesis. 

And this I think, which might be the 'pierce-de-resistance', and might figure 'quotation-as-criticism' [here]

as something akin to prophetic ironisation as paranoia, Myself playing the role of a shabby Pierce, and that rupture of nomenclature being filled by syntaxis, but perhaps disguised (poetically) as syntaxiom, which really draws the bow-string tighter upon the target, this time, Zeno's "transitional infinity" to replace a unitizing infinitesimalism of measure with one of potential change, a granularisation of poetic will, of semiosis as well, but rendering Zeno, or really the relation of the sign to the signifier as a 'transrational infinity', which is something Rajaniemi handles brilliantly in his novel The Quantum Thief by the addition of augmented consciousness, whereby a warrior might have access in situ to astronomical thought processing speeds,

more or less the same idea we saw in the Matrix where Neo dodges the bullets, which could have just as easily been arrows, errors, eros, or rice for that matter..

O Arise ye Archers, and let sing your strings, 

having taken your rays from the quarrel.