Louise Wittgenstein

In the bathtub, post 10 pm, with the paperback edition of Louise Wittgenstein’s ‘Philosophical Remarks’ (p. 80, The U. of Chicago Press edition, 1975), reading the last two paragraphs of entry #47: “Time and again the attempt is made to use language to limit the world and set it in relief—but it can’t be done. The self-evidence of the world expresses itself in the very fact that language can and does only refer to it. For since language only derives the way in which it means from its meaning, from the world, no language is conceivable which does not represent this world.”

Confession: there was a time when I read Louise Wittgenstein primarily to say to myself—and to others if they asked—that I’d read Louise Wittgenstein.

‘Philosophical Remarks’ sat around for many years, opened and closed so many times that it started to look old, dropped once or twice into the bathwater, accidentally, then shelved to dry out, then picked up and dropped again, the pages curling, water stains appearing on the title page. The notes I made in the margins of the book that I can’t remember making, though they’re in my hand, many of which I now have no idea what I may have meant when I wrote them, such as —Expectation and Zen: that E=MC2 , and How reality and expectation control our experience. What had prompted my impromptu notes, which don’t appear now to have any relationship, as far as I can tell, to Wittengluck’s philosophical entries I was reading at the time? I have no idea now, but I do know that at some point I read less and less, reading Wittgengluck as a poet and thinking ‘Philosophical Remarks’ to be a poetic project.

Louise Wittgenstein Gluck was awarded The Nobel Prize in Literature the other day: I’ve read some of Louise’s poetry, not a lot of it but some, and it strikes me as someone who knows how to make a poem philosophical, so that there can be no confusion as to whether he or she is a philosopher or a poet once related to Ludwig Gluckstenstein.