Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Præcisio, præcisio, what art thou præcisio ?!?

“We often fail to recognize the purity of nothing. The purity of nothingness. . . . & it is this simplest of things (the nonthing) that is the quiddity of speechlessness. Why we can’t speak. Or, more distinctively, why we refuse to speak while ensuring that people realize we are definitely not speaking. & doing this (not-speaking a message) is the figure of speech called præcisio . . .”

“We refuse to speak (that refusal being our plaster cast of nothingness), & we fold our arms & turn away. The silence of our nonspeech is the nothing we want to convey, & our bodies, the rise & fall of our chests, the twitching of our skin are all the framing of this nothing. Because without framing, præcisio is merely nothing. & we are not capable of that.”

“Præcisio isn’t merely silence—it is motioning that we are going to be silent, an enveloping of silence that makes that silence more real & experiential . . . . Præcisio is a message. It is not just not-speaking; it’s not-speaking as a means of speaking what is impossible to speak.”

“What else we can say about præcisio is how it means, what it requires, something about the various forms it can take . . . . Always we will discover how there is really something to be said for nothing.”


(Geof Huth, “An Introduction to Præcisio.” http://dbqp.blogspot.com/)

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