Cogitøgraphy 3.0: Thinking-Writing-Reading … Still?

Summer Writing Program, Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics
Naropa University, June, 2-28, 2014
Kyoo Lee, Visiting Faculty, Week 1

Thinking-writing-reading forms certain triceps of the mind, as performatively vocalized in The Tale (1980) by Meredith Monk, where the last line, “I still have my philosophy~” loops back into the first, “I still have my hands~” via the piano-player who hehahos her way in and out as if born tickled. This daughter laughter fuels the text that weaves and waves itself out of itself, leaving that Latinic ego modernly undone—or redone. Indeed, at the end of the day, “how can it be denied (quâ ratione posset negari) that these hands and this body are mine?,” as one queries in The Meditations (René Descartes, 1641), in passing. What, now? What next? Turning to such auto-bio-graphic “stillness,” this course looks into that “zero point/degree” of auto-documentary zones, for which poets are said to be “always headed” (Durs Grünbein, “Outline of a Personal Psycho-Poetics,” 2010). How and where does research become re-search and vice versa; when does one stop/restart in this universe of embodied minding? Unpacking the tripartite dynamics of cogitøgraphy, we will try and “work it out” while working through an organic mix of theoretical essays on those (t)issues, which will also help us explore our own cogitøgraphic traces and trajectories.