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Emily Dickinson wrote once that she dwelt "in Possibility--a fairer House than Prose." FOR YEARS (til quite recently, when Alice corrected me), I have been telling folks that, like Dickinson, "I dwell in Disappointment."

I think that I have just been hoisted on my own petard. The OED says that "disappoint," which comes to English from French, combines "dis-" with "appoint" (from  à point--to the point, to bring matters to a point; to agree, arrange, settle).  So to "dis"-appoint (or to be disappointed) is to refuse to come to the point, to go in different directions, "apart, abroad, away." To dwell in disappointment, then, might mean to be willing to go off point, to have an open mind. Not to be so goal-directed.

Not a bad goal for me....

an opening, as Alice says, into possibility, into the sort of joyfulness and playfulness that might come from being free of the fear of disappointment, from the confidence that disappointment won’t kill.

Okay, so I WAS a little disappointed that our first meeting didn't attend to the three texts we'd read, because I think all of them--Sontag in her refusal of interpretation, as shielding us from the full-frontal assault of art; Feyerabend, in his refusal of methodology, as limiting the scope of what science might see; and Stallybrass, in his rather different refusal of originality, as neglecting the cultural commons in which we all work--were offering us possibilities for how we--this rag-tag gathering of very different sorts of minds and hearts, investments and interests--might move collaboratively together toward...

who knows what?

Since we met, my own adjacent reading has led me from William James to those who learned from him. I've been spending some time this week w/ Gertrude Stein (who took seven courses from him @ Harvard), and I'm figuring out that--having studied w/ James how the mind makes associations (and can learn, with experience, to alter them)--she put his science into practice in her art, writing words and paragraphs that seem @ first to be "non-sense," or which make their sense through sound rather than through habitual meanings. She thereby unsettles our usual modes of using words, our unthinkingness about how we make meaning, and invites us into alternative interpretations (I wonder what Mark, who recently staged one of her plays, thinks of this idea?).

Anyhow, I have a sense that what we are doing, collectively, is something quite Stein-ian: trying to avoid reiterating old habits, trying to escape some closed systems (of method, of interpretation, of thought), trying to search for a way to enact a conversation that might be more interactive, and therefore inevitably more unpredictable, in its outcomes. Placing ourselves in conversation w/ representations made by others of who we are (as Stein, photographed here by Man Ray, adjacent to Picasso's portrait of who she was, seeming to call her flesh-and-blood self into account...)