The successful scientist thinks like a poet but works like a bookkeeper.

heh

An interesting article about the capacity of abstraction we humans have.  I do think the author is correct in saying that to understand the arts, and generally the humanities, we need to come to some better understanding of the evolutionary and cognitive forces involved in our way of  ”minding” the world.

One interesting thing about the article is what it doesn’t say, or rather the roads glimpsed but untrodden. For example, he talks a great deal about our relative sensory deprivation as a species, but doesn’t connect that to the development of arts as a way of compensation for that lack.

I do wonder why not.

I’m serious about the question. Please answer either here so others can see your response or send me an email — mary (at) tailfeather (dot) ca.

I’m reading Deleuze and a book linking Deleuze to von Uexküll and I’m trying to get my head around a world seen through a “plane of immanence”.

I can get the idea of a limited umwelt in an animal like a tick, but Deleuze seems to be saying that the idea of a static umwelt is a mistake. Rather the question should be how such states of response to the world surface, and resurface continually. But more about that later. Right now I’m trying to figure out what an umwelt is according to Deleuze. If an organism is really a set of interlocking reactions to other “organisms”, and rocks can be “organisms” of this sort, then shouldn’t kinase receptors have an umwelt? And if so, what isn’t an umwelt, or an organism?

aaaargh

Just because they put in more pondering time their solutions are more creative.

John Cleese on creativity. A delight to watch. It’s a bit long so I’ve just linked the youtube site.

Cleese has some funny (always – I expect his death will be funny too) things to say about creativity, but it is also quite correct.

thanks to mango for the link

There’s this kind of poetry called “found”. What you do is take a document – in this case spam – excerpt phrases and make a poem out of it. You don’t add any of your own words, just take theirs.  So I started looking at the mother-lode of spam I get a week (hundreds) with a new eye.

Take this hilarity:

rife with speling problems and I to find it very troublesome to inform the truth

mix it with this:

possessor I conceive the articles

and you’ve got a poem seed.

Heh.

Last night I looked up at 9PM. I’d been working since I got up at 5AM. Before that I had crashed, but dreamt about one of the ideas I’d been thinking about, and the power of the dream was so strong it slapped me out of sleep. I stumbled to my computer so I could get down the dream, and most importantly, the dream word that held the whole dream in its pieces.

I did that. Started reading and next thing I needed more sleep and it was 9PM. And here I am the next morning at 7:30 having worked since 5 and realizing it is April 1. Last I knew it was the 29th.

Har.

The mind.

Oh, the new word from my dream is “diplumyin”. It means (according to the dream) “the flowering of a child.”

For example, I had a dream last night about a stone staircase leading down from an esplanade to a beach. I think I’ve dreamed of this place before – I have vague memories of a buildings in the town. This time the entire action of the dream involved me feeling with my bare feet and hands the rather cool silky sands of the beach.

The question remains how does this suggest a solution to my problem of constructing this manuscript.

I had a bit of a flash about this today – in that the staircase may be a metaphor for the shape of the thing. The problem with bodies is that they don’t think with words but with movement patterns, actions, shapes, smells, etc. So how can a piece of writing, a series of poems to be exact, be understood as the shape of a staircase? And the sand? It is to feel like the sand did in the dream?

Going to bed to think about this some more.

For most of the day, walking around the little lake, moving carefully along the cliff edge, even walking up and down the deck of the small ferry it was if Mary Oliver’s soft animal of the body was snick, snick, snicking with contentment. It’s as if only with regular, rhythmic movement the body knows it is alive, and so only then, and only on that contented somatic basis, the many selves who together constitute Mary can leaf out a green happiness.

The class talks about white space and its impact on meaning. One of the things about white space is that it can be a passive space, its shape completely determined by the text. In this example the white space is determined by the characters. The space, as the text says, makes meaning possible but it doesn’t actively provide meaning in and of itself.

Imagine “30 spokes” presented differently – in some way that would create white space that represents the insight of the poem.

As for my bitty, the exercise in the class asked us to create a poem in which the white space was considered as important as the text. There are many ways to do that of course but this is the one that I took to class.

This kind of poetry is not my natural metier but there is much to be learnt from attention to what is not normally seen.

A single summer grant me, great powers, and
   A single autumn for fully ripened song
      That, sated with the sweetness of my
         Playing, my heart may more willingly die.
The soul that, living, did not attain its divine
   Right cannot repose in the nether world.
      But once what I am bent on, what is
         Holy, my poetry is accomplished,
Be welcome then, stillness of the shadows' world!
   I shall be satisfied, though my lyre will not
       Accompany me down there. Once I
          Lived like the gods, and more is not needed.

It’s a lovely poem but still there is a sense in Holderlin of the “there” – the place that is not “here” and I react poorly to such a suggestion. For me, the shadows do not need to come since they are already here. At least that’s my sense of a moment completely experienced. There is the ping ping ping of living but there is also the silence between.

As much as I appreciate Holderlin, I prefer Benn’s morgue poems.

Here are two of my favourites.

Little Aster

A drowned beer-hauler was heaved onto the slab.
Someone had wedged a lavender aster
between his teeth.
As I reached through the chest
under the skin
with a long knife
to cut out the tongue and palate
I must have bumped the flower, for it slid
into the brain lying alongside.
I packed it into the chest cavity
with the sawdust
as we sewed up.
Drink your fill in that vase!
Rest in peace,
little aster!

A Fine Childhood

The mouth of a girl who had long lain in the reeds
looked so chewed up.
When we broke open the torso, the esophagus was so full of holes.
Finally in a bower under the diaphragm
we found a nest of young rats.
One little sister rat lay dead.
The others were living off liver and kidney,
drinking the cold blood and enjoying
a fine childhood.
And fine and fast was their death too:
we threw the whole bunch into water.
Oh, how those little snouts squeaked!

Got to appreciate the shadows too. It’s as if to appreciate the moment, one must walk with the shadow in one hand and the light in the other.