Reality Riffs

I've been thinking again lately about worlds we compose in our minds vs the "real world out there". Once we get into human symbol systems (technically “sign” systems according to the semioticians), all or many bets are off in terms of limitations based upon coherence with empirical reality.  And since sometimes, perhaps often, the whole point of engaging in some symbolic worlds is to deviate from, replace, or largely defy reality, then no surprise, they do.  It’s possible to enter a symbolic world, engage in its rituals and lingo, follow its codes and experience the affective – and sometimes intellectual – payoffs that they may facilitate.

I think of the reality defiance of Cervantes's Don Quijote, the composed worlds within composed worlds as in the Forest of Arden in As You Like It, or the riffs and intonations of Iris DeMent in both word and sound.  Video games apply.  Live music concerts or what's between your ear buds. We step across thresholds of structures and do what would be very funny things with our bodies that within that context make absolute sense.  And, then again, "the real world", "mind", and other lingo like this, important as they are, are also abstractions.  The "real world out there" is already "in here", and we're riffing and intoning them how we do as we do every moment.

-bbc

Self, Variations

Whitman’s expansive self recalls for me what people tell me about atman and Brahman in Hinduism and confirm him as a mystic, in a certain sense.  His “mysticism” is based in “empirical” description but a phenomenon under his description isn’t “just there.”  It’s there as we’ve seen it and experienced it and felt it.  It’s there as it’s run through our brains and been spit out as particular words.  Letting words do their work is simultaneously letting our brains do their work – that’s the entire brain system / body, from head to toe and back again.

I need Whitman’s expansive empirical mysticism, or something like it, from time to time, perhaps often.  However, there can be a disconnect, a bit of the pie in the sky, and this is where I relate sometimes more with some portions of Ashbery, where we have the expanded sense of self but now drastically more finite.  I’ll never get over the first words of his I read years back, the opening of his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), opening poem,

            I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
            Elsewhere we are sitting in a place where sunlight
            Filters down, a little at a time,
            Waiting for someone to come.  Harsh words are spoken….

            (From J.A., “As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat”)

We might start with the air of Icarus before he gets too far, before the emergency, and before a potentially fatal fall and end up sitting right where we are, waiting, in the sun, filtering to a little spot there within eye-shot of a maple, in a squabble.

-bbc

Words Work

'Words don't need to be dressed up.  Words do the work themselves.'  I thought this as I heard a speech recently where affect was used heavily in order to 'help' the words along.  But words usually don't need help -- it just depends what the words are. 

When all else fails, it's sometimes thought, insert pathos.  But following Aristotle, as I was taught him, pathos emerges as a result of logos rather than added on as another strategy.  (Same goes for ethos.)  Why sometimes do we think words need help?

Well, sometimes they do need help, but if we're in the word business then the first attention really should go to letting words and combinations of words do their work.  Perhaps from the weakness of some particular word combinations we're then tempted to play a 'pathos' card or cash in on 'ethos' as if these aren't already bound up in the 'logic' of our words.

And by logic here I don't mean syllogisms necessarily (nor even enthymemes) but whatever structure of words one strings together in such a way that works.  Part of 'what works' is how these words (in any given situation) relate to other words we know.  And part of what works is how these words relate to our experience -- what we feel and think.  

I think of Dickinson again.  She doesn't need my help in reading her -- e.g., as I read her aloud.  She's done (almost) all the work, and I mostly need to get out of the way so her work can do what it does.  Can we trust that the words will do their work?  -bbc