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1---
2title: Autocento of the breakfast table
3subtitle: about this site
4genre: prose
5
6id: about
7toc: "_about Autocento_"
8
9project:
10 title: Front matter
11 css: front-matter
12...
13
14## Introduction
15
16_Autocento [of the breakfast table][]_ is a hypertextual exploration of the workings of revision across time.
17Somebody^[[citation needed][]]^ once said that every relationship we have is part of the same relationship; the same is true of authorship.
18As we write, as we continue writing across our lives, patterns thread themselves through our work: images, certain phrases, preoccupations.
19This project attempts to make those threads more apparent, using the technology of hypertext and the opposing ideas of the _hapax legomenon_ and the _cento_, held in tension with each other.
20
21I'm also an MFA candidate at [Northern Arizona University][NAU].
22This is my thesis.
23Let me tell you about it.
24
25[of the breakfast table]: http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/owh/abt.html
26[citation needed]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources#Dealing_with_unsourced_material
27[NAU]: http://nau.edu/CAL/English/Degrees-Programs/Graduate/MFA/
28
29### [Hapax][] legomenon, or _You are special_
30
31_Hapax legomenon_ ([ἅπαξ][] λεγόμενον) is Greek for "something said only once."
32It comes from the field of corpus linguistics, where it causes problems for translators of ancient texts.
33Because it only happens once in its corpus, a _hapax legmonenon_ is an enigma: there's only one context to guess its meaning from.
34This means that many _hapax legomena_ remain untranslated, as in Mayan tablets, or are questionably translated, as in the Bible.
35
36Given the way we use language every day, treading over the same words and thoughts in a way that is nonetheless comforting, and given the fact that a _hapax legomenon_ is, by its definition, the rarest word in the place it appears, you might think that _hapax legomena_, as phenomena, are rare.
37You'd be wrong.
38In the Brown Corpus of American English Text, which comprises some fifty thousand words, [about half are _hapax legomena_][].
39In most large corpora, in fact, between forty and sixty per cent of the words occur only once, and another ten to fifteen per cent occur only twice, a fact that I imagine causes translators all sorts of [grief][].
40
41This seeming paradox is reminiscent of another in biology, as summed up by this infographic I keep seeing around the Internet[^1]\:
42![Really. I see it everywhere.](https://i.imgur.com/Dub8k.png)
43
44Apparently, the chances of you, dear Reader, being born is [something][s1] like one in 10^2,685,000^.
45The chances of me [being born][] is [something][s2] like one in 10^2,685,000^.
46The chances of the guy you stood behind in line [for your coffee][] this morning?
47His chance of being born was [something][s3] like one in 10^2,685,000^.
48The thing is, a number like one in 10^2,685,000^ stops meaning so much when we take the number of times such a "rare" event occurs.
49There are about seven billion (or $7 \times 10^{9}$) people on Earth---and all of them have that same small chance of one in 10^2,685,000^ of being born.
50And they all were.
51
52It stops seeming so special after thinking about it.
53
54[Hapax]: hapax.html
55[ἅπαξ]: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=a%28/pac
56[about half are _hapax legomena_]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapax_legomenon#cite_note-6
57[grief]: one-hundred-lines.html
58[being born]: about-the-author.html
59[for your coffee]: yellow.html
60[s1]: music-433.html
61[s2]: poetry-time.html
62[s3]: dollywood.html
63
64### _Cento_, or _just like everyone else_
65
66_Cento_ is Latin, stolen from the Greek κέντρόνη, which means "patchwork garment."
67A _cento_ is a poem composed completely from parts of other poems, a mash-up that makes up for its lack of originality in utterance with a novelty in arrangement.
68
69If we apply the _cento_ to biology, we can win back some of that uniqueness, we can resolve some of that paradox of the _hapax legomenon_.
70Sure, [nothing is new under the sun][], but it can be made new if we say it differently, or if we put it next to something it hasn't met before.
71We can become hosts to the parties of our lives, and rub elbows with the same tired celebrities everyone's rubbed elbows with, but make it different.
72Because _we_ put the [tables on roller skates][].
73Because _we_ told [the joke][] this time with a Rabbi.
74Because _we_ are special [snowflakes][], and it doesn't matter that there's more of us than there is sand on the beaches at Normandy.
75Because _we_ are still all different somehow.
76
77[nothing is new under the sun]: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+1%3A9&version=NIV
78[tables on roller skates]: call-me-aural-pleasure.html
79[the joke]: creation-myth.html
80[snowflakes]: snow.html
81
82### On _n_-grams
83
84What we have so far:
85- A _hapax legomenon_ technically refers only to _one word_ in a corpus.
86- A _cento_ technically refers to a poem with _whole phrases_ taken from others, patchwork-style.
87
88These concepts get more interesting as we play with their scopes.
89To do that, we need to take a look at the _n_-gram.
90
91In linguistics and computational probability, an _n_-gram is a [contiguous system of _n_ items from a given sequence of text or speech][ngram-def].
92By looking at _n_-grams, linguists can look at deeper trends in language than with single words alone[^2].
93_N_-grams are also incredibly useful in natural language processing---for example, they're how your phone can guess what you're going to [text your mom][] next[^3].
94They're also the key to fully reconciling the _hapax legomenon_ and the _cento_.
95
96If the definition of _hapax legomena_ is expanded to include _n_-grams of arbitrary lengths,
97 including full utterances, complete poems, or the [collected works of, say, Shakespeare][],
98 then we can say that all writing is a _hapax legomenon_,
99 because no one else has said the [same words in the same order][].
100In short, everything written or in existence is individual.
101Everything is differentiated.
102Everything is an [island][].
103
104If the definition of what comprises a _cento_ is minimized to individual trigrams, bigrams, or even unigrams (individual words), or even parts of words, we arrive again at Solomon's lament: that no writing is original; that every utterance has, in some [scrambled][] way at least, been uttered before.
105To put it another way, [nothing][] is individual.
106We're stranded [afloat on an ocean][] of language we did nothing to create, and the best we can hope to accomplish is to find some combination of flotsam and jetsam that hasn't been put together too many times before.
107
108This project, _Autocento of the breakfast table_, works within the tension caused by _hapax legomena_ and _centi_, between the first and last half of the statement _we are all unique, just like everyone else_.
109
110[ngram-def]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-gram
111[text your mom]: mountain.html
112
113[same words in the same order]: http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2011/07/poetry-best-words-in-best-order.html
114[collected works of, say, Shakespeare]: http://shakespeare.mit.edu/
115[island]: island.html
116
117[scrambled]: howtoread.html
118[nothing]: no-nothing.html
119[afloat on an ocean]: riptide_memory.html
120
121## Process
122
123In compiling this text, I've pulled from a few different projects:
124
125- [Elegies for alternate selves][elegies-link]
126- [The book of Hezekiah][hez-link]
127- [Stark raving][stark-link]
128- [Buildings out of air][paul-link]
129
130as well as [new poems][], written quite recently.
131As I've compiled them into this project, I've linked them together based on common images or language, disregarding the order of their compositions.
132What I hope to have accomplished with this hypertext is an approximation of my self as it's evolved, but [all at one time][].
133Ultimately, _Autocento of the breakfast table_ is a [long-exposure photograph][] of my mind.
134
135[elegies-link]: elegyforanalternateself.html
136[hez-link]: prelude.html
137[stark-link]: table_contents.html
138[paul-link]: art.html
139[new poems]: last-passenger.html
140[long-exposure photograph]: building.html
141[all at one time]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJjcF2DmFFY
142
143### A note on terminology
144
145_Autocento of the breakfast table_ comprises work of multiple genres, including prose, verse, tables, lists, and hybrid forms.
146Because of this, and because of my own personal hang-ups with terms like [_poem_][] applying to works that aren't verse (and even some that are[^4]), _piece_ applying to anything, really (it's just annoying, in my opinion---a piece of what?), I've needed to find another word to refer to all the _stuff_ in this project.
147While the terms "literary object" and "intertext," à la Kristeva et al., more fully describe the things I've been writing and linking in this text, I'm worried that these terms are either too long or too esoteric for me to refer to them consistently when talking about my work.
148I believe I've found a solution in the term _page_, as in a page or [leaf][] of a book, or a page on a website.
149After all, the term _page_ is accurate as it refers to the objects herein--each one is a page---and it's short and unassuming.
150But it's probably pretty pretentious, too.
151
152[_poem_]: on-genre-dimension.html
153[leaf]: leaf.html
154
155### The inevitable creep of technology
156
157Because this project lives online (welcome to the Internet!), I've used a fair amount of technology to get it there.
158
159First, I typed all of the objects present into a human-readable markup format called [Markdown][] by John Gruber, using a plain-text editor called [Vim][].[^5]
160Markdown is a plain-text format that uses unobtrusive mark-up to signal semantic meaning around a text.
161A text written with markup can then be passed to a compiler, such as John Gruber's `Markdown.pl` script, to turn it into functioning HTML for viewing in a browser.
162
163As an example, here's the previous paragraph as I typed it:
164
165~~~markdown
166First, I typed all of the objects present into a human-readable markup format
167called [Markdown][] by John Gruber, using a plain-text editor called [Vim][].
168[^5] Markdown is a plain-text format that uses unobtrusive mark-up to signal
169semantic meaning around a text. A text written with markup can then be passed
170to a compiler, such as John Gruber's original Markdown.pl script, to turn it
171into functioning HTML for viewing in a browser.
172
173[Markdown]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
174[Vim]: http://www.vim.org
175
176[^5]: I could've used any text editor for the composition step, including
177 Notepad, but I personally like Vim for its extensibility, composability,
178 and honestly its colorschemes.
179~~~
180
181And here it is as a compiled HTML file:
182
183~~~html
184<p>
185 First, I typed all of the objects present into a human-readable markup format
186 called <a href="http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/">Markdown</a>
187 by John Gruber, using a plain-text editor called <a href="http://www.vim.org">
188 Vim</a>. <a href="#fn1" class="footnoteRef" id="fnref1"> <sup>1</sup></a>
189 Markdown is a plain-text format that uses unobtrusive mark-up to signal
190 semantic meaning around a text. A text written with markup can then be passed
191 to a compiler, such as John Gruber's original Markdown.pl script, to turn it
192 into functioning HTML for viewing in a browser.
193</p>
194
195<section class="footnotes">
196 <hr />
197 <ol>
198 <li id="fn1">
199 <p>
200 I could've used any text editor for the composition step, including
201 Notepad, but I personally like Vim for its extensibility, composability,
202 and honestly its colorschemes.
203 <a href="#fnref1">↩</a>
204 </p>
205 </li>
206 </ol>
207</section>
208~~~
209
210For these files, I opted to use John McFarlane's [pandoc][] over the original `Markdown.pl` compiler, because it's more consistent with edge cases in formatting, and because it can compile the Markdown source into a wide variety of different formats, including DOCX, ODT, PDF, HTML, and others.
211I use an [HTML template][] for `pandoc` to correctly typeset each object in the web browser.
212The compiled HTML pages are what you're reading now.
213
214Since typing `pandoc [file].txt -t html5 --template=_template.html --filter=trunk/versify.exe --smart --mathml --section-divs -o [file].html` over 130 times is highly tedious, I've written a [GNU][] [Makefile][] that automates the process.
215In addition to compiling the HTML files for this project, the Makefile also compiles each page's backlinks (accessible through the &phi; link at the bottom of each page), and the indexes of [first lines][], [common titles][], and [_hapax legomena_][hapaxleg] of this project.
216
217Finally, this project needs to enter the realm of the Internet.
218To do this, I use [Github][], an online code-collaboration tool that uses the version-control system [git][] under the hood.
219`git` was originally written to keep track of the source code of the [Linux][] kernel.[^6]
220I use it to keep track of the revisions of the text files in _Autocento of the breakfast table_, which means that you, dear Reader, can explore the path of my revision even more deeply by viewing the [Github repository][] for this project online.
221
222For more information on the process I took while compiling _Autocento of the breakfast table_, see my [Process][] page.
223
224[Markdown]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
225[Vim]: http://www.vim.org
226[pandoc]: http://johnmcfarlane.net/pandoc/
227[HTML template]: https://github.com/duckwork/autocento/blob/gh-pages/template.html
228[GNU]: https://www.gnu.org/software/make/
229[Makefile]: https://github.com/duckwork/autocento/blob/gh-pages/makefile
230[first lines]: first-lines.html
231[common titles]: common-titles.html
232[hapaxleg]: hapx.html
233[Github]: https://github.com
234[git]: http://www.git-scm.com
235[Linux]: http://www.linux.org
236[Github repository]: https://github.com/duckwork/autocento
237[Process]: process.html
238
239### Motivation
240
241Although `git` and the other tools I use were developed or are mostly used by programmers, engineers, or other kinds of scientists, they're useful in creative writing as well for a few different reasons:
242
2431. **Facilitation of revision.**
244 By using a VCS like `git` and plain text files, I can revise a poem (for example, "[And][]") and keep both the current version and a [much older one][old-and].
245 This lets me hold onto every idea I've had, and "throw things away" without _actually_ throwing them away.
246 They're still there, somewhere, in the source tree.
2472. **Future proofness.**
248 By using a simple text editor to write out my files instead of a proprietary word processor, I've ensured that no matter what may happen to the stocks of Microsoft, Apple, or Google in the following hundred years, my words will stay accessible and editable.
249 Also, I don't know how to insert links in Word.
2503. **Philosophy of intellectual property.**
251 I use open-source, or libre, tools like `vim`, `pandoc`, and `make` because information should be free.
252 This is also the reason why I'm releasing _Autocento of the breakfast table_ under a Creative Commons [license][].
253
254[And]: and.html
255[old-and]: https://github.com/duckwork/autocento/commit/61baf210a9d0d4fffcd82751ba3419dd2feb349d#diff-8814290de165531212020a537e341e44
256[license]: license.html
257
258## _Autocento of the breakfast table_ and you
259
260### Using this site
261
262Since all of the objects in this project are linked, you can begin from, say, [here][possible-start] and follow the links through everything.
263But if you find yourself lost as in a funhouse maze, looping around and around to the same stupid [fountain][] at the entrance, here are a few tips:
264
265- The &xi; link at the bottom of each page leads to a random article.
266- The &phi; link at the bottom of each page leads to its back-link page, which lists the titles of pages that link back to the page you were just on.
267- Finally, if you're really desperate, the &loz; link sends you back to the [cover page][], where you can start over.
268 The cover page links you to the [table of contents][toc], as well as the indexes of [first lines][fl], [common titles][ct], and [_hapax legomena_][hl].
269
270[possible-start]: in-bed.html
271[fountain]: dollywood.html
272[cover page]: index.html
273[toc]: _toc.html
274[fl]: first-lines.html
275[ct]: common-titles.html
276[hl]: hapax.html
277
278### Contact me
279
280If you'd like to contact me about the state of this work, its history, or its future; or about my writing in general, email me at [case dot duckworth plus autocento at gmail dot com][email].
281
282[email]: mailto:case.duckworth+autocento@gmail.com
283
284[^1]: Which apparently, though not really surprisingly given the nature of the Internet, has its roots in [this][born-blog] blog post.
285
286[born-blog]: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/abinazir/2011/06/15/what-are-chances-you-would-be-born/
287
288[^2]: For more fun with _n_-grams, I recommend the curious reader to point their browsers to the [Google Ngram Viewer][], which searches "lots of books" from most of history that matters.
289
290[Google Ngram Viewer]: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=technically+refers&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1600&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t4%3B%2Ctechnically%20refers%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Btechnically%20refers%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BTechnically%20refers%3B%2Cc0
291
292[^3]: For fun, try only typing with the suggested words for a while.
293 At least for me, they start repeating "I'll be a bar of the new York NY and I can be a bar of the new York NY and I can."
294
295[^4]: For more discussion of this subject, see "[Ars poetica][ars]," "[How to read this][how-read]," "[A manifesto of poetics][manifesto]," "[On formal poetry][formal-poetry]," and [The third section] of "Statements: a fragment."
296
297[ars]: arspoetica.html
298[how-read]: howtoread.html
299[manifesto]: manifesto_poetics.html
300[formal-poetry]: onformalpoetry.html
301[The third section]: statements-frag.html#declaration-of-poetry
302
303[^5]: I could've used any text editor for the composition step, including Notepad, but I personally like Vim for its extensibility, composability, and honestly its colorschemes.
304
305[^6]: As it happens, the week I'm writing this (6 April 2015) is `git`'s tenth anniversary.
306 The folks at Atlassian have made an [interactive timeline][] for the occasion, and Linux.com has an interesting [interview with Linus Torvalds][], `git`'s creator.
307
308[interactive timeline]: https://www.atlassian.com/git/articles/10-years-of-git/
309[interview with Linus Torvalds]: http://www.linux.com/news/featured-blogs/185-jennifer-cloer/821541-10-years-of-git-an-interview-with-git-creator-linus-torvalds
diff --git a/text/abstract.txt b/text/abstract.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 649cdab..0000000 --- a/text/abstract.txt +++ /dev/null
@@ -1,38 +0,0 @@
1---
2title: Autocento of the breakfast table
3subtitle: _abstract_
4genre: prose
5
6id: abstract
7toc: abstract
8
9project:
10 title: Front matter
11 class: front-matter
12...
13
14Technology has utterly changed the ways in which we interact with ourselves, society, and nature.
15Ways of thinking and collaborating thought all-but-impossible less than a generation ago have become commonplace, even necessary, in the Internet age.
16_Autocento of the breakfast table_ is an attempt to leverage the power of the Internet to capture the [author][]’s inspiration, composition, and revision processes all at one time, through a linked hypertext.
17
18As a website, _Autocento of the breakfast table_ is at first enigmatic.
19The reader is unable to merely consume the text; they must actively interact with it---by clicking links, in this case---in order to create a meaning.
20In doing so, the reader empathetically engages with the author’s published self, journeying with the author or around the author to create a text that is utterly unique to the moment it’s being read.
21In a sense, the reader is not merely a reader, but a user of the text in front of them: they can get as much or as little from it as they are willing.
22
23The Internet is the perfect medium for a text like _Autocento of the breakfast table_.
24Scott Rosenberg, in his essay “[Will Deep Links Ever Truly Be Deep?][]” on Medium, notes that “originally, the exact purpose of links was” to make “conceptual links” and connect “disparate thoughts” across a democratic space---the Web.
25The Web, envisioned this way, removes the arbitrary structuring of page order, publishing imprints, and temporality that print technology is bounded by.
26With a Web-like platform, ideas can live of themselves, by themselves, and for themselves: instead of ordering ideas by some value system, we can organically link them together by similarities.
27
28The ideas that _Autocento of the breakfast table_ works with and links together are the [_hapax legomenon_][], or “something said only once,” and the _cento_, or “patchwork garment.”
29These two ideas are held in a kind of balance when expanded to the scale of a poem: while every word has necessarily been said before, every thought unoriginal, the author can hope to arrange these unoriginal thoughts into their own shapes.
30To put it another way, we’re all making pots out of the same clay, but each one is irrevocably ours.
31The cento of _Autocento of the breakfast table_ is the project itself, in its entirety; I am a composite of everything I’ve done.
32
33_Case Duckworth_
34_Flagstaff, 2015_
35
36[author]: about_author.html
37[Will Deep Links Ever Truly Be Deep?]:
38[_hapax legomenon_]: hapax.html
diff --git a/text/arspoetica.txt b/text/arspoetica.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 2ca9033..0000000 --- a/text/arspoetica.txt +++ /dev/null
@@ -1,50 +0,0 @@
1---
2title: Ars poetica
3genre: prose
4
5id: arspoetica
6toc: "Ars poetica"
7
8project:
9 title: Elegies for alternate selves
10 class: elegies
11 order: 6
12 prev:
13 - title: On seeing the panorama of the Apollo 11 landing site
14 link: apollo11
15 next:
16 - title: The ocean overflows with camels
17 link: theoceanoverflowswithcamels
18...
19
20What is poetry?
21[Poetry is.][is]
22Inasmuch as life is, so is poetry.
23Here is the problem: life is very big and complex.
24Human beings are neither.
25We are small, simple beings that don't want to know all of the myriad interactions happening all around us, within us, as a part of us, all the hours of every day.
26We much prefer knowing only that which is just in front of our faces, staring us back with a look of utter contempt.
27This is why many people are depressed.
28
29Poetry is an attempt made by some to open up our field of view, to maybe check on something else that isn't staring us in the face so contemptibly.
30Maybe something else is smiling at us, we think.
31So we write poetry to force ourselves to look away from the [mirror][] of our existence to see something else.
32
33This is generally painful.
34To make it less painful, poetry compresses reality a lot to make it more consumable.
35It takes life, that seawater, and boils it down and boils it down until only the salt remains, the important parts that we can focus on and make some sense of the senselessness of life.
36Poetry is life bouillon, and to thoroughly enjoy a poem we must put that bouillon back into the seawater of life and make a delicious soup out of it.
37To make this soup, to decompress the poem into an emotion or life, requires a lot of brainpower.
38A good reader will have this brainpower.
39A good poem will not require it.
40
41What this means is: a poem should be self-extracting.
42It should be a rare vanilla in the bottle, waiting only for someone to open it and sniff it and suddenly there they are, in the orchid that vanilla came from, in the tropical land where it grew next to its brothers and sister vanilla plants.
43They feel the pain of having their children taken from them.
44A good poem leaves a feeling of loss and of intense beauty.
45The reader does nothing to achieve this---they are merely the receptacle of the feeling that the poem forces onto them.
46In a way, poetry is a crime.
47But it is the most beautiful crime on this crime-ridden earth.
48
49[is]: words-meaning.html
50[mirror]: moongone.html
diff --git a/text/epigraph.txt b/text/epigraph.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 2dc2c13..0000000 --- a/text/epigraph.txt +++ /dev/null
@@ -1,34 +0,0 @@
1---
2title: epigraph
3subtitle: "&ndash; Sylvia Plath"
4genre: prose
5
6id: epigraph
7toc: "_epigraph_"
8
9project:
10 title: Elegies for alternate selves
11 class: elegies
12 order: 1
13 next:
14 - title: How to read this
15 link: howtoreadthis
16 prev:
17 - title: Death's Trumpet
18 link: deathstrumpet
19...
20
21I saw my life branching out before me like the [green fig tree][] in the story.
22From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.
23One fig was a husband and a happy home and children,
24and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor,
25and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor,
26and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America,
27and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of [other lovers][] and queer names and offbeat professions,
28and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.
29I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to [death][], just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.
30I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
31
32[other lovers]: spittle.html
33[death]: deathstrumpet.html
34[green fig tree]: peaches.html
diff --git a/text/howtoread.txt b/text/howtoread.txt deleted file mode 100644 index d03b1b2..0000000 --- a/text/howtoread.txt +++ /dev/null
@@ -1,104 +0,0 @@
1---
2title: How to read this
3genre: prose
4
5id: howtoread
6toc: "How to read this"
7
8project:
9 title: Elegies for alternate selves
10 class: elegies
11 order: 2
12 next:
13 - title: And
14 link: and
15 prev:
16 - title: epigraph
17 link: epigraph
18...
19
20This book is an exploration of life, of all possible lives that could be lived.
21Each of the poems contained herein have been written by a different person, with his own history, culture, and emotions.
22True, they are all related, but no more than any of us is related through our genetics, our shared planet, or our yearnings.
23
24Fernando Pessoa wrote poems under four different identities---he called them *heteronyms*---that were known during his lifetime, though after his death over sixty have been found and catalogued.
25He called them heteronyms as opposed to pseudonyms because they were much more than names he wrote under.
26They were truly different writing selves, concerned with different ideas and writing with different styles:
27Alberto Caeiro wrote pastorals;
28Ricardo Reis wrote more formal odes;
29Álvaro de Campos wrote these long, Whitman-esque pieces (one to Whitman himself);
30and Pessoa's own name was used for poems that are kind of similar to all the others.
31It seems as though Pessoa found it inefficient to try and write everything he wanted only in his own self;
32rather he parceled out the different pieces and developed them into full identities, at the cost of his own:
33"I subsist as a kind of medium of myself, but I'm less real than the others, less substantial, less personal, and easily influenced by them all."
34de Campos said of him at one point, "[Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, doesn't exist.][pessoa-exist]"
35
36It's not just Pessoa---I, strictly speaking, don't exist, both as the specific me that writes this now and as the concept of selfhood, the ego.
37Heraclitus famously said that we can't step into the [same river][] twice, and the fact of the matter is that we can't occupy the same self twice.
38It's constantly changing and adapting to new stimuli from the environment, from other selves, from inside itself, and each time it forms anew into something that's never existed before.
39The person I was when beginning a poem is distinct from the person who finished the poem, largely due to the poem itself.
40In a way, it's been the waiter that brought the next course into the great meal that is myself.
41
42In the same way, with each poem you read of this, you too could become a different person.
43Depending on which order you read them in, you could be any number of possible people.
44If you follow the threads I've laid out for you, there are so many possible selves; if you disregard those and go a different way there are quite a few more.
45However, at the end of the journey there is only one self that you will occupy, the others disappearing from this universe and going maybe somewhere else, maybe nowhere at all.
46
47There is a scene in *The Neverending Story* where Bastian is trying to find his way out of the desert.
48He opens a door and finds himself in the Temple of a Thousand Doors, which is never seen from the outside but only once someone enters it.
49It is a series of rooms with six sides each and three doors: one from the room before and two choices.
50In life, each of these rooms is a moment, but where Bastian can choose which of only two doors to enter each time, in life there can be any number of doors and we don't always choose which to go through---in fact, I would argue that most of the time we aren't allowed the luxury.
51
52What happens to those other doors, those other possibilities?
53Is there some other version of the self that for whatever complexities of circumstance and will chose a different door at an earlier moment?
54The answer to this, of course, is that we can never know for sure, though this doesn't keep us from trying through the process of regret.
55We go back and try that other door in our mind, extrapolating a possible present from our own past.
56This is ultimately unsatisfying, not only because whatever world is imagined is not the one currently lived, but because it becomes obvious that the alternate model of reality is not complete: we can only extrapolate from the original room, absolutely without knowledge of any subsequent possible choices.
57This causes a deep disappointment, a frustration with the inability to know all possible timelines (coupled with the insecurity that this may not be the best of all possible worlds) that we feel as regret.
58
59In this way, every moment we live is an [elegy][] to every possible future that might have stemmed from it.
60Annie Dillard states this in a biological manner when she says in *Pilgrim at Tinker Creek*, "Every glistening egg is a memento mori."
61Nature is inefficient---it spends a hundred lifetimes to get one that barely works.
62The fossil record is littered with the failed experiments of evolution, many of which failed due only to blind chance: an asteroid, a shift in weather patterns, an inefficient copulation method.
63Each living person today has twenty dead standing behind him, and that only counts the people that actually lived.
64How many missed opportunities stand behind any of us?
65
66The real problem with all of this is that time is only additive.
67There's no way to dial it back and start over, with new choices or new environments.
68Even when given the chance to do something again, we do it *again*, with the reality given by our previous action.
69Thus we are constantly creating and being created by the world.
70The self is never the same from one moment to the next.
71
72A poem is like a snapshot of a self.
73If it's any good, it captures the emotional core of the self at the time of writing for communication with future selves, either within the same person or outside of it.
74Thus revision is possible, and the new poem created will be yet another snapshot of the future self as changed by the original poem.
75The page becomes a window into the past, a particular past as experienced by one self.
76The poem is a remembering of a self that no longer exists, in other words, an elegy.
77
78A snapshot doesn't capture the entire subject, however.
79It leaves out the background as it's obscured by foreground objects; it fails to include anything that isn't contained in its finite frame.
80In order to build a working definition of identity, we must include all possible selves over all possible timelines, combined into one person: identity is the combined effect of all possible selves over time.
81A poem leaves much of this out: it is the one person standing in front of twenty ghosts.
82
83A poem is the place where the selves of the reader and the speaker meet, in their respective times and places.
84In this way a poem is outside of time or place, because it changes its location each time it's read.
85Each time it's two different people meeting.
86The problem with a poem is that it's such a small window---if we met in real life the way we met in poems, we would see nothing of anyone else but a square the size of a postage stamp.
87It has been argued this is the way we see time and ourselves in it, as well: Vonnegut uses the metaphor of a subject strapped to a railroad car moving at a set pace, with a six-foot-long metal tube placed in front of the subject's eye; the landscape in the distance is time, and what we see is the only way in which we interact with it. It's the same with a poem and the self: we can only see and interact with a small kernel.
88This is why it's possible to write more than one poem.
89
90Due to this kernel nature of poetry, a good poem should focus itself to extract as much meaning as possible from that one kernel of identity to which it has access.
91It should be an atom of selfhood, irreducible and resistant to paraphrase, because it tries to somehow echo the large unsayable part of identity outside the frame of the self.
92It is the [kernel][] that contains a universe, or that speaks around one that's hidden; if it's a successful poem then it makes the smallest circuit possible.
93This is why the commentary on poems is so voluminous: a poem is tightly packed meaning that commentators try to unpack to get at that universality inside it.
94A fortress of dialectic is constructed that ultimately obstructs the meaning behind the poem; it becomes the foreground in the photograph that disallows us to view the horizon beyond it.
95
96With this in mind, I collect these poems that were written over a period of four years into this book.
97Where I can, I insert cross-references (like the one above, in the margin) to other pieces in the text where I think the two resonate in some way.
98You can read this book in any way you'd like: you can go front-to-back, or back-to-front, or you can follow the arrows around, or you can work out a complex mathematical formula with Merseinne primes and logarithms and the 2000 Census information, or you can go completely randomly through like a magazine, or at least the way I flip through magazines.
99If writing is a communication of the self, then this is the best way to communicate mine in all its multiversity.
100
101[pessoa-exist]: philosophy.html
102[same river]: mountain.html
103[elegy]: words-meaning.html
104[kernel]: arspoetica.html
diff --git a/text/manifesto_poetics.txt b/text/manifesto_poetics.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 5b5181e..0000000 --- a/text/manifesto_poetics.txt +++ /dev/null
@@ -1,47 +0,0 @@
1---
2title: Manifesto of poetics
3genre: prose
4
5id: manifesto_poetics
6toc: "A manifesto of poetics"
7
8project:
9 title: Stark raving
10 class: stark
11...
12
13What is a poem?
14I think it was Yeats that called a poem "the best words in the best order," and that isn't an inaccurate description, but I don't think it captures all of what a poem is.
15[Let me start][] with communication.
16
17Communication is a transaction, an exchange between two people or entities, in which one (the Speaker/Writer/Communicator) gives the other (the Reader/Listener/Consumer) a \
18set of ideas / \
19a wireframe organization of a concept / \
20a set of reasons/instructions for action.
21In many kinds of communication, for example speeches, reports, or advertisements, the kind of ideas transacted are generally factual/logical/brain-based in nature.
22In art, these ideas are emotional/heart-based.
23In short, Art is to Emotion as an [Article][] is to Information.
24I think art should strive to transmit the emotion the author feels as efficiently as possible to the reader of that art.
25
26In order to do this, multiple notation systems have been devised.
27Music is the most notable example that comes to mind, as it has the most rigid style, but grammar, as used self-consciously in writing, would be another example.
28Poetry has only a very loose set of rules and assumptions that allow it a sort of notational language, and this is complicated by the fact that when writing poetry, the author writes for a different medium: poetry is meant to be performed aloud.
29This makes the notation system even more important, but again, it's hard to come up with a system that will be read mostly the same by most people.
30
31What I've been trying to do since I began writing is develop a personal notation system, or what I think most would refer to as my "voice" as a poet/writer (I personally don't like the word "poet," as it sounds pretentious to me; I'm aware I should get over this).
32
33However, there were some places that still needed improving from my draft manuscript: most notably, my prose in "Rip Tide of Memory" (now only "Rip Tide") and "AMBER Alert."
34I rewrote each to tighten their syntactic and idea rhythm, to make them move more lightly and gracefully.
35
36The most notable difference in my series is the reordering of poems within it.
37I think that in my first draft, I spent so much time on getting my individual poems tight and polished that I threw them together somewhat haphazardly, using a loose thematic correspondence with the fake "Table of contents."
38With the new order, I hope this has been fixed: the piece consists of six sections, each with three poems (A new one, "Everything stays the same," makes the totals correct).
39Each section has a thematic/emotional/personal element that ties the sections together.
40They are ordered by the order in which I wrote the sestinas at the beginning of each section, which works out to make the series move from identity to memory to a feeling of universal justice, and from there to a discussion of death and (something like) love that culminates in an exploration of the nature of time and cosmology.
41The piece is bookended by the fake "Table of contents" (provided at the end as an ironic commentary on the rest of the text) and an "About the author" section.
42I think it works better this way, and I think the "About the author" at the beginning serves as a fair prelude poem to the piece.
43
44I'm excited to be a writer like I haven't been before.
45
46[Let me start]: prelude.html
47[Article]: README.html#fn1
diff --git a/text/on-genre-dimension.txt b/text/on-genre-dimension.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 65d305d..0000000 --- a/text/on-genre-dimension.txt +++ /dev/null
@@ -1,93 +0,0 @@
1---
2title: On genre and the dimensionality of poetry
3genre: prose
4
5id: on-genre-dimension
6toc: "On genre and the dimensionality of poetry"
7
8project:
9 title: Autocento of the breakfast table
10 class: autocento
11...
12
13How does one describe a poem?
14
15A genre is a set of creative outputs that fit a given set of criteria.
16Genres are useful as a sort of shorthand when describing a thing of art: instead of noting, for example, all of the objects depicted in a still-life that aren't people or land-features, we call it a still-life and get on to describing how the objects interrelate to each other on the canvas.
17If you ask me what kind of painting I'm working on, and I say, "a still-life," you have an expectation of certain elements the painting will contain.
18If you happen to be an agent and try to sell the painting later, you'll say to your prospective buyers, "It's a still-life," and whether the buyer is over the phone or standing in the gallery, they'll know whether they'll like it or not based on whether they like still-lifes.
19In the same way, they can call you up and ask if you have any still-lifes for sale right now, and get a simple yes-or-no answer for it.
20This is the first kind of genre, and it applies well within separate types of fundamentally-different media, such as painting, sculpture, film, or the written word.
21
22A poem, obviously, is in this last category, and for some reason its designation is hairier than others'.
23People refer to all sorts of art, or even dispassionate events, as poetry; dancing is called "poetry in motion," for example.
24I think the confusion is caused in part by the nature of writing as a medium, namely in that it captures thoughts more clearly and communicably than other art forms.
25While a picture can be "worth a thousand words," as the old cliché goes, when those words are actually written out they can contain shades of meaning impossible to capture in the picture itself, at least as quickly as they can be absorbed in writing.
26It seems as though writing is akin to the fundamental nature of thought, or at least of spoken language, which our thought is steeped in.
27
28So we know what _writing_ is.
29What is a _poem_?
30Especially in a world with such forms as prose poetry, flash fiction, short-shorts, lyrical essays, [lyrical _ballads_][], et cetera, what makes a poem a poem?
31
32I read an essay once that lamented the unidimensionality of writing.
33It posited that prose is really just a long, wrapped line of text that's bound by time---when you read a novel, for example, you really must start at the beginning and read through to the end, in order.
34Some newer forms of fiction are changing this, such as the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure genre in the 1970s and 80s, or hyperfiction found online, which raises the question for me if these newer forms could be considered on some level to be poetry.
35
36This is because poetry has more than one dimension, due to its linear nature---those line breaks are intentional, and the poem can't just fit into any-sized book or web page.
37If prose is a liquid, filling any container it's placed in with a constant volume, poetry is more like a crystallized form of prose, or to put it another way, poetry has between [one and two dimensions][].
38I wouldn't say that poetry has fully two dimensions, except for some of the more conceptually visual stuff that I'd call a word-picture anyway, because from line to line that unidimensionality of prose remains.
39Poetry has a higher dimensionality than prose, though, because it's crystallized there on the page; this fractal-dimensionality of poetry has interesting side effects on the genre itself.
40
41For one thing, poetry isn't as bound by time as prose is.
42It can, as Marianne Boruch writes, resist "narrative sequence," or "the forward press of _time_ itself," due to its repetitions and diversions, which are in turn made possible or more apparent by its line breaks.
43It's able to meditate on a subject, or expand on it lyrically, exploring the emotions connected with the images in the poem, or the connections between images.
44Through repitition of sounds, the poem builds meaning through resonance and rhyming, something that's harder to do in prose.
45Take, for example, the first lines of "[The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock][]:"
46
47> Let us go then, you and I, \
48> When the evening is spread out against the sky \
49> Like a patient etherized upon a table; \
50> Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, \
51> The muttering retreats \
52> Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels \
53> And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: \
54> Streets that follow like a tedious argument \
55> Of insidious intent \
56> To lead you to an overwhelming question.... \
57> Oh, do not ask, "What is it?" \
58> Let us go and make our visit.
59
60And here it is again, without line breaks:
61
62> Let us go then, you and I,
63> when the evening is spread out against the sky
64> like a patient etherized upon a table;
65> let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
66> the muttering retreats
67> of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
68> and sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
69> streets that follow like a tedious argument
70> of insidious intent
71> to lead you to an overwhelming question....
72> Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
73> Let us go and make our visit.
74
75The end-rhymes that do so much for the sound of the poem are gone, and so part of the meaning of the poem---its obsessive self-consciousness, its paranoia---are gone as well.
76Additionally, line breaks act as punctuation in the entirety of this [fragment][]; without them, the meaning becomes obscured in the long first sentence of the poem.
77
78Perhaps due to this dwelling on scene, or on all aspects of a single scene at one time, poetry tends to be heavy on images, or lyrical.
79I think this is what's generally meant when someone describes a dance as "poetic," or a story or anything else: I think they really mean "lyrical," or maybe "beautiful." The images form sort of a narrative as the reader moves through them, as Cesare Pavese says, that's nevertheless [different than a traditional narrative][]: this "image narrative" jumps from image to image not by a logical progression but by the resonances between the images that run underneath them, on almost a subliminal plane.
80Almost without noticing, the reader of a poem is taken on an emotional journey that's not necessarily connected to the images of the poem, themselves.
81
82Poetry is a manipulation of emotion, or a communication of it.
83Prose has the space, the time to describe what's going on, even if the author stands by the old adage of "show, don't tell."
84_Showing_ in prose inherently involves more telling than poetry does, as poetry communicates a feeling itself.
85This definition may be broad enough to include certain dance performances or paintings, but that's okay.
86I'm of the opinion that the more useful genre distinctions are those which describe the thing technically: _verse_, for example, or _lyrical_.
87_Poetry_ is almost a value judgement, and that makes me a little uncomfortable.
88
89[lyrical _ballads_]: http://www.bartleby.com/39/36.html
90[one and two dimensions]: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/psychology/cogsci/chaos/workshop/Fractals.html
91[The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock]: http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html
92[fragment]: statements-frag.html
93[different than a traditional narrative]: http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2011/03/07/translation-adaptation-and-transformation-the-poet-as-translator-an-essay-by-richard-jackson/
diff --git a/text/process.txt b/text/process.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 955f0f3..0000000 --- a/text/process.txt +++ /dev/null
@@ -1,70 +0,0 @@
1---
2title: Autocento of the breakfast table
3subtitle: process narrative
4genre: prose
5
6id: process
7toc: "Process narrative"
8
9project:
10 title: Front matter
11 class: front-matter
12...
13
14## Hi. My name is Case Duckworth. This is my thesis.
15
16_Autocento of the breakfast table_ is an inter/hypertextual exploration of the workings of inspiration, revision, and obsession.
17I've compiled this work over multiple years, and recently linked it all together to form a (hopefully) more cohesive whole.
18To make this easier than collating everything by hand, I've relied on a process that leverages open-source technologies to publish my work onto a web platform.
19
20## Process steps
21
221. Write poems.
232. Convert to Markdown.
24 - Markdown, originally by [John Gruber][], is a lightweight markup language that allows me to focus on the _content_ of my writing, knowing that I can work on the _presentation_ later.
25 - The original `markdown.pl` program is buggy and inconsistent with how it applies styles to markup. It also only works to convert text to HTML.
26 - Because of these limitations, I've used John MacFarlane's [extended Markdown syntax][], which lets me write richer documents and programmatically compile my work into multiple formats.
273. Compile to HTML with Pandoc.
28 - At first, I used this code in the shell to generate my HTML:
29 ```bash
30 for file in *.txt; do
31 pandoc "$file" -f markdown -t html5 \
32 --template=template.html -o "${file%txt}html"
33 done
34 ```
35 but this proved tedious with time.
36 - After a lot of experimenting with different scripting languages, I finally realized that [`GNU make`][] would fit this task perfectly.
37 - You can see my makefile [here][makefile]---it's kind of a mess, but it does the job. See below for a more detailed explanation of the makefile.
384. Style the pages with CSS.
39 - I use a pretty basic style for _Autocento_. You can see my stylesheet [here][stylesheet].
404. Use [Github][] to put them online.
41 - Github uses `git` under the hood---a Version Control System developed for keeping track of large code projects.
42 - My workflow with `git` looks like this:
43 - Change files in the project directory---revise a poem, change the makefile, add a style, etc.
44 - (If necessary, re-compile with `make`.)
45 - `git status` tells me which files have changed, which have been added, and if any have been deleted.
46 - `git add -A` adds all the changes to the _staging area_, or I can add individual files, depending on what I want to commit.
47 - `git commit -m "[message]"` commits the changes to git. This means they're "saved"---if I do something I want to revert, I can `git revert` back to a commit and start again.
48 - `git push` pushes the changes to the _remote repository_---in this case, the Github repo that serves <http://autocento.me>.
49 - Lather, rinse, repeat.
505. Write Makefile to extend build capabilities.
51 - As of now, I've completed a _[Hapax legomenon][]_ compiler, a [back-link][] compiler, and an updater for the [random link functionality][] that's on this site.
52 - I'd like to build a compiler for the [Index of first lines][] and [Index of common titles][] once I have time.
53
54## The beauty of this system
55
56- I can compile these poems into (almost) any format: `pandoc` supports a lot.
57- Once I complete the above process once, I can focus on revising my poems.
58- These poems are online for anyone to see and use for their own work.
59
60[John Gruber]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
61[extended Markdown syntax]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html#pandocs-markdown
62[`GNU make`]: https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html
63[makefile]: https://github.com/duckwork/autocento/blob/gh-pages/makefile
64[stylesheet]: https://github.com/duckwork/autocento/blob/gh-pages/style.css
65[Github]: https://github.com
66[Hapax legomenon]: hapax.html
67[back-link]: makefile
68[random link functionality]: trunk/lozenge.js
69[Index of first lines]: first-lines.html
70[Index of common titles]: common-titles.html
diff --git a/text/words-irritable-reaching.txt b/text/words-irritable-reaching.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 07b5ef9..0000000 --- a/text/words-irritable-reaching.txt +++ /dev/null
@@ -1,55 +0,0 @@
1---
2title: Words and their irritable reaching
3genre: prose
4
5id: words-irritable-reaching
6toc: "Words and their irritable reaching"
7
8project:
9 title: Autocento of the breakfast table
10 class: autocento
11...
12
13Somewhere I remember reading advice for beginning writers not to show their work to anyone, at least that in the early stages.
14The author argued that it took all of the power out of the idea, like a pressure-release valve, before any of that creative power got to be applied to the page.
15It made me think of "[Meditation at Legunitas][]," when Hass writes "that each particular erases / the luminous clarity of a general idea."
16As a self-confessed General Idea person, I identify with the remark: it does seem as though, no matter how lofty the idea I originally have for a poem, once I sit down to write the thing I quickly get bogged down in the details, the particulars.
17I guess the writer of that lost article must work the same way, leading to their advice: if the "luminous clarity of a general idea" is so fragile that just beginning to write it down ruins it somehow, _telling_ people about it is even worse.
18
19But back to that Robert Hass poem: while he does say that thing about the "luminous clarity of a general idea," and he adds to it that "[a word is elegy][] to what it signifies," his tone is lightly chiding this philosophy.
20He opens his poem with "All the new thinking is about loss. / In this it resembles all the old thinking," which to my mind lampoons both the new and the old thinking for not having anything new, ultimately, to say.
21He attributes these thoughts to a friend, whose voice carried "a thin wire of grief, a tone / almost querulous" about that loss of luminous clarity.
22The speaker of Hass's poem remembers a woman he made love to, once, and this image takes over the poem in all its specificity, from "her small shoulders" to his "childhood river / with its island willows," to "the way her hands dismantled bread."
23
24Even in disproving his friend's remarks through his imagery, the speaker of "Meditation at Legunitas" admits that "It hardly had to do with her"---and here is the heart of what Hass is saying about poetry.
25A poem hardly has to do with what it's written about, on the surface level; as Richard Hugo says it in [a famous essay][], a poem has a "triggering subject" and it has a "real or generated subject," which for Hugo in "Meditation at Legunitas" is something about the way that not only general ideas, but particulars, such as the body or hands or "the thing her father said that hurt her," which is such a beautiful generality that is somehow also a particular truth, are luminous to poetry and to life-as-lived.
26The philosophers can say what they want, but we experience the world bodily and particularly to ourselves.
27
28There's still a problem with language, however, to which Hass speaks by the end of his poem, with those repetitions of "blackberry, blackberry, blackberry," in that, as Jack Gilbert says in his poem "[The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart][]," "How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, / but frightening that it does not quite."
29There is still that "[irritable reaching][] after fact & reason" that language, as communication, requires---I think Keats would agree that he wrote about a near-unattainable ideal in his letter that only Shakespeare and maybe Coleridge and a few others could achieve, this "Negative Capability."
30Gilbert furthers Keats in asserting that no matter what we write, "the words / Get it wrong," that utterance is itself that irritable reaching.
31
32In Gilbert's poem, though, he does reach after something.
33In the second half of the poem he begins to imagine what the "mysterious Sumerian tablets" could be as poetry, instead of just "business records:"
34
35> [...] My joy is the same as twelve \
36> Ethiopian goats standing in the morning light. \
37> O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper, \
38> as grand as ripe barley under the wind's labor. \
39> Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts \
40> of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred \
41> pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what \
42> my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this \
43> desire in the dark.
44
45This is my favorite part of the poem, and I think it's because Gilbert, like Hass, reaches for the specific in the general; he brings huge ideas like the Lord or Love or Joy into the specific images of salt, copper, or honey, or like he says at the end of his poem: "What we feel most has / no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds."
46This, ultimately, is what Keats was getting at, and Hugo, too: that the real subject of any poetry is not capturable in the words of the poem, but that rather a poem speaks around its subject.
47To be honest, all [art][] may do this.
48What sets a poem apart is its honesty about that fact.
49
50[Meditation at Legunitas]: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/177014
51[a word is elegy]: words-meaning.html
52[a famous essay]: http://ualr.edu/rmburns/RB/hugosubj.html
53[The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart]: http://www.smith.edu/poetrycenter/poets/theforgottendialect.html
54[irritable reaching]: http://www.mrbauld.com/negcap.html
55[art]: art.html
diff --git a/text/words-meaning.txt b/text/words-meaning.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 06747a1..0000000 --- a/text/words-meaning.txt +++ /dev/null
@@ -1,43 +0,0 @@
1---
2title: Words and meaning
3genre: prose
4
5id: words-meaning
6toc: "Words and meaning"
7
8project:
9 title: Elegies for alternate selves
10 class: elegies
11 order: 4
12 prev:
13 - title: And
14 link: and
15 next:
16 - title: On seeing the panorama of the Apollo 11 landing site
17 link: apollo11
18...
19
20"How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, / and frightening that it does not quite," Jack Gilbert opens his poem "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart."
21In a similar vein, Hass's "Meditation at Legunitas" states, "A word is elegy to what it signifies."
22These poems get to the heart of language, and express the old duality of thought: by giving a word to an entity, it is both tethered and made meaningful.
23
24Words are the inevitable byproduct of an analytic mind.
25Humans are constantly classifying and reclassifying ideas, objects, animals, people, into ten thousand arbitrary categories.
26A favorite saying of mine is that "Everything is everything," a tautology that I like, because it gets to the core of the human linguistic machine, and because every time I say it people think I'm being [disingenuous][].
27But what I mean by "everything is everything" is that there is a continuity to existence that works beyond, or rather underneath, our capacity to understand it through language.
28Language by definition compartmentalizes reality, sets this bit apart from that bit, sets up boundaries as to what is and is not a stone, a leaf, a door.
29Most of the time I think of language as limiting, as defining a thing as the [inverse of everything][] is not.
30
31In this way, "everything is everything" becomes "everything is nothing," which is another thing I like to say and something that pisses people off.
32To me, infinity and zero are the same, two ways of looking at the same point on the circle---of numbers, of the universe, whatever.
33Maybe it's because I wear an analogue watch, and so my view of time is cyclical, or maybe it's some brain trauma I had in vitro, but whatever it is that's how I see the world, because I'm working against the limitations that language sets upon us.
34I think that's the role of the poet, or of any artist: to take the over-expansive experience of existing and to boil it down, boil and boil away until there is the ultimate concentrate at the center that is what the poem talks around, at, etc., but never of, because it is ultimately made of language and cannot get to it.
35A poem is getting as close as possible to the speed of light, to absolute zero, to God, while knowing that it can't get all the way there, and never will.
36A poem is doing this and coming back and showing what happened as it happened.
37Exegesis is hard because a really good poem will be just that, it will be the most basic and best way to say what it's saying, so attempts to say the same thing differently will fail.
38A poem is a kernel of existence.
39It is a description of the kernel. [It is][].
40
41[disingenuous]: likingthings.html
42[inverse of everything]: i-am.html
43[It is]: arspoetica.html