The word frisson
Tell Truth and Shame the Devil
Le Mot Frisson
My research on how to translate (from latest entry working on this week) for Cioran’s Journal. The word frisson.
Does it mean thrill or chill!
Reverso site says: thrill, chill, shudder, shiver, rush, tremor… Usage that comes up, its mostly thrill or chill.
From Cioran’s Journal
I grasp for nothing more than skeleton prose as a shudder (frisson) passes through. Man is inevitably heading to catastrophe. As long as I am convinced of this I will remain interested in him, avidly, passionately.
Poetry strictly speaking seems to me more and more inconceivable; I can no longer bear that which is implicit, indirect, precisely not said, I hear the poetry without the means and the subterfuges it usually counts on.
Etymology AI
The word "frisson" originates from Old French "friçon," meaning "shiver," and ultimately derives from the Latin "frictiō," meaning "friction" or "massage".
However, this Latin root was mistakenly associated with "frīgēre," meaning "to be cold," leading to the modern understanding of "frisson" as a sudden, passing sensation of excitement, a shudder of emotion, or a thrill.
Means and Subterfuge
Big question for me came up again and again, about “living on the image” poetically neck deep.
As exists and persists, as ever, in sensations of the sublime.
Modern writers do battle with it. Both Beckett and Cioran. Whereas Joyce exhumes across all means of meaning a sense for how poetry interrogates, questioning difference, engaged with psychologically in terms of projection, desire, madness, and as encumbrances, that rue and plunder as subterfuge.
Effected and affected by, as treasure, in heart of beast, whose tremors pass through, in the vasty deep1.
Poetry, starting right back at Battle with the Trees, finds sublime in language as way to describe senses, quel frisson of beauty hell sorrow death etc.
SM called it FIZZ. Which became Frizz. Tis, whizz, is what it is. Through my usual expansion.
And yet it works for me as finding direction, creating (somehow) a balancing act, that efforts to acknowledge the way “vasty deep” works one over by way of its intensities, including evolutions into means and subterfuge - the divine, the metaphysical, the absurd etc. going back through millennia and there upon my avidity —
Finding in it, a way to loot right down to its roots, peeling off language, its means and subterfuge, etc., piece by piece, and thereby layout its intensities, on my senses and sanity.
Clarice kind of does that too methinks.
Shakespeare’s HENRY THE FOURTH, PART 1 ACT 3, SCENE 1, 52-58
Glendower:
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur:
Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
Glendower:
Why, I can teach you, cousin, to command
The devil
Hotspur:
And I can teach thee, coz, to shame the devil—
By telling the truth. Tell truth and shame the devil.