on ‘becoming real’

From Gerald Bruns’s The Material of Poetry: Sketches for a Philosophical Poetics:

Recall some lines [of Clark Coolidge] just cited:

that fair
the part
of the part plots
ending in for the most part bolts
as of wholes
golds
come to as risen divides

In an essay on “How to Nonread,” the antiparatactic language poet Gerald Burns says that the trouble with poems of this sort is that “‘reading’ them means finding ways to make them interesting, to recover them from dullness.” But of course “finding interesting ways to read” is the philosophical challenge of paragrammatical poetry, as Burns well knows. I think it is possible to experience these words as something other than nonsense. [...] In a paratactic poem, the displacement of syntax means that words can enter into all kinds of unpredictable semantic relations and evoke many possible contexts. So the problem is arguably not one of nonsense but of too much sense, augmented or invigorated by alliteration, assonance, and echoes of all sorts (“bolts / wholes / golds”). The poem forces us to expand our boundaries of what we think of as meaningful. Over the course of ninety-eight pages it teaches us something about the limits of exegesis or about the shortfall in the way we are taught to read in school, where the rules of information theory are almost exclusively in force. Gerald Burns has a nice way of putting it: “Any poem teaches you how to read it. A long poem teaches you to live with it.” As noted earlier, poetry requires us to become anthropologists: we make sense of a poem not by the application of critical methods but by living with it until we are part of its world. Anthropologists like Clifford Geertz call this process “becoming real.” We have to integrate ourselves into alternative poetic worlds and not restrict language to what seem to us self-evident poetic criteria.

the pancake problem

Richard Foreman, offering some thoughts about contemporary life to Edge in 2005:

I come from a tradition of Western culture in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.

And such multi-faceted evolved personalities did not hesitate—especially during the final period of “Romanticism-Modernism”—to cut down, like lumberjacks, large forests of previous achievement in order to heroically stake new claim to the ancient inherited land—this was the ploy of the avant-garde.

But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available”. A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become “pancake people”—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.

Will this produce a new kind of enlightenment or “super-consciousness”? Sometimes I am seduced by those proclaiming so—and sometimes I shrink back in horror at a world that seems to have lost the thick and multi-textured density of deeply evolved personality.

Discovered via Nicholas Carr’s essay on Google in The Atlantic.

on truth and lie in an extra-moral sense

Sontag on Simone Weil in the February 1963 New York Review of Books (which advertises Weil’s Selected Essays with Oxford University Press for an unbelievable $7):

Perhaps there are certain ages which do not need truth as much as they need a deepening of the sense of reality, a widening of the imagination. I, for one, do not doubt that the sane view of the world is the true one. But is that what is always wanted, truth? The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

[...]

No one who loves life would wish to imitate her dedication to martyrdom nor would wish it for his children nor for anyone else whom he loves. Yet so far as we love seriousness, as well as life, we are moved by it, nourished by it. In the respect we pay to such lives, we acknowledge the presence of mystery in the world—and mystery is just what the secure possession of the truth, an objective truth, denies. In this sense, all truth is superficial; and some (but not all) distortions of the truth, some (but not all) insanity, some (but not all) unhealthiness, some (but not all) denials of life are truth-giving, sanity-producing, health-creating, and life-enhancing.