Love this from Talespinning.
And sunset wouldnt suit you
you were only twenty-four
although the image of an orange sky
glowing red upon the rice fields
is age-old but hardly seems serene.
I wonder what’s drawing these associations out? That image on the water and the focus on the negative “wouldn’t suit you.” Landscape encounters are engrossing, a sort of framing of memorial experience. Besides firy moments, is there anything more stirring than optical infinity?
My good friend Rina asks about the meaning of Prufrock:
“I get the impression it is about growing old? The reflections of an old man?”
I grow old . . .I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
This is a partial answer, the rest is somewhere in the poem. It has to do with mermaids and love.
But here’s another issue, one that extends the last two posts: the poem is the meaning. How does one paraphrase the guitar work of Lara y Reyes? Neither Lorca, Eliot, or Williams declair meaning. They merely write the image, the narrative, or the series of stanzas and the audience is left to wonder and respond. But what is a response? How does one respond to Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach in Death in Venice or this from Jimmy Santiago Baca, from Work We Hate and Dreams We Love:
. . .
Life is filled with work
Meiyo hates,
and while he saws, 2X4’s,
trims lengths of 2X10’s on table saw,
inside his veins another world
in full color etches
a blue sky on his bones,
a man following a bison herd,
and suddenly his hammer becomes a spear
he tosses to the ground
uttering a sound we do not understand.
Then there’s all I need to know from Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, lines 73-74:
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
That’s it. Now there’s a red wheelbarrow.
Is it too much to say that the writer or imagemaker must strive to evoke experience or approximations of experience in the audience? My experience with Interactive Fiction calls up an evoking of the simulated space and the slow emergence of that space in time, leaving an afterimage of the textual world. The experience is weirdly visceral.
Here’s William Carlos William’s The Red Wheelbarrow.
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
Why does the object matter? We talked about this in CW today, worrying about how much the author must try and let the reader read and experience, rather than doing the work for the reader or disallowing the possibility of experience. In IF the equivalent is to solve the puzzle for the reader.
Why does the object matter, this kind of sight?
We need to ask Lorca, who writes in The Spilled Blood:
Let my memory kindle!
Warn the jamines
of such minute whiteness!
I will not see it!
. . . . . . . . . .
But now he sleeps without end.
Now the moss and the grass
open with sure fingers
the flower of his skull. . .
The stuff that happens behind the scenes is complex. It always amazes me, for example, that computers actually work and when I turn the ignition in my jeep, the thing starts. EEtimes reports on the things that happen behind the scenes. Consider this:
Working with researchers at the University of New Mexico’s Center for Microengineered Materials, Sandia scientist John Shelnutt has created convoluted platinum structures that might be used to split hydrogen atoms from water molecules, leading to a light-driven source of hydrogen.
Controlling platinum deposition at the molecular level could be used in such applications as “catalysis, sensors and optoelectronic and magnetic devices,” he said.
Porphyrin is only one component in a complex series of molecular stages used by the photosynthetic process to convert light into the chemical ATP, which is the fuel that powers all living cells. Chlorophyll acts as an antenna that resonates with photons, passing the energy along to porphyrin, which responds by donating electrons to a complex molecular configuration that uses them to generate protons inside a cavity. The protons then drive the synthesis of ATP from precursors. The entire process is complex and still not fully understood.
Part of the quest is to find more efficient photosynthetic machines, since the natural variety is highly inefficient.
Molecular systems that mimic photosynthesis also have applications in molecular electronics. Devens Gust, a biochemist at Arizona State University (Tempe, Ariz.), has been working with Michael Kozicki in the university’s Department of Electrical Engineering to find a way to connect optical-molecular electronic switches based on photosynthetic components to the completely different material system found in silicon-based electronic circuits.
Power can be defined in all kinds of ways. Curiosity can be a part of the definition, which means that the border will always morph.
The ideas of energy, action, and power are going to take different forms in English literature through various voices and imagined worlds, such as Blake’s and Shelley’s. The authors will reflect on permanence, change, and relationships.
We’re always going to be working with a subtext of philosophic and/or emperical materialism and various kinds of spiritualism and their manifestations in forms: science, philiosophy, art, religion and government. But there are loose distinctions between the approaches to the real and the spiritual. Contemporarily, philosophic materialism and empirical materialism (I make a distinction)are at odds. Science is the study of the observable. Science’s mission is not to disprove or prove the existence of deity. To claim an atheistic program to science is a strawman argument. It’s the same as claiming that those who engineer cars are trying to change the nature of horses or prevent peoples’ use of their legs. Neither is the argument that materialism denies a spritual reality something to take to heart. That Hobbes may or may not have been an atheist is a conclusion that leads to wasted time.
We may appeal to the deity for the right answers, but we still need to act. It is people who will bear the consequences.
We need supercolliders; we need to understand the subatomic. We could always explain the birth of children by inferring that children are placed whole into the womb by the gods rather than as the result of biological processes. This is another kind of power negotiation. Maybe life’s difficulties come from the eggs generated by Leda and Zeus or come as a result of Adam and Eve. Maybe those are stories we tell because we have no better answer.
Does obsessive moralism breed spatial morass, intellectual malaise, laziness, and spatial shrinkage. Consider the marketplace, which needs controls, either from the buying audience, the makers, or regulators, such as lawmakers.
I mean spatial in terms of definitions, extended or sensed. America, for example, is a wandering border, growing, shrinking, moving with its birthright across mapped borders. In many ways I fear a shrinkage of that space. Will the rising crop of thinkers depart the country seeking more liberalized territory in which to study genetics and other sciences that rub others the wrong way.
I try to read what researchers and thinkers and makers say about climatology, genetics, physics, and art. I rarely listen to people who assume to interprete the ideas for political reasons. For me, it seems a squandering of time for CNN to ask people if they think that this political season will be the worst one in history. What does it matter, for example, either way? The question, while geared toward a loose definition of audience interaction, reflects an attitude of “keep them busy with dumb questions while we make up their minds for them.”
The question has no thought; it’s mere cognitive interlude; it’s perpertual night. As McCarthy would claim it, the night will never end. Radio pundits want to nail down the truth of things; they know all the answers, or speak as if they do; they know the science better than the scientists. They give the impression of smallness.
We need open space. Blakespace.
A quick search of Firstgov helped me snag the text of co-sponsor Musgrave’s Federal Marriage Amendment H.J. Res. 56.
This is classic policy claim stuff, complete with all the stock issues associated with a problem solution bit of argument. The solution to the problem is, of course, the amendment, which reads
Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.
In my opinion (and perhaps in Orwell’s), phrases and verbal chunks such as “Neither . . . shall be construed to require that . . .” are always problematic, and, dare I say, always meant to deceive. “Be construed to require” here can be taken as “‘interpreted’ to require” or “shall be ‘interpreted’ to require that . . .” or ‘shall be understood’ to require. In other words, the amendment language is merely ordering that one interpretation be discounted, obviated, restrained, or simply ignored. All people shall take the color red as to construe the color of red and no other color shall forthwith be taken or be understood to mean any other color other than red. Personally speaking, I think a sentence like the first be set as law in the United States goes beyond idiocy. From here to eternity, none shall ever but when together and side by side grasp the left hand of their companion with their right hand unless they are married and in that case and in no other case which shall not be construed as a suggestion but as quoth from on high, or heard on the wind, shall henceforth keep their hands in the rear pocket of their opposite, which shall require that only married couples shall be required to wear pants.
To continue the stock language issues, here’s the problem the amendment means to solve
The Federal Marriage Amendment is an urgently needed response to the pending judicial destruction of the legal status of marriage in America. Most legal experts predict that a case now pending before the Massachusetts state Supreme Court will destroy marriage as the union of a man and a woman. At that point, lawsuits will be filed in every state to force this destructive social revolution upon the entire nation. Since over 70% of Americans believe marriage is uniquely the union of a man and woman, the American people have consistently voted to defend marriage in both Hawaii and Alaska.
Here are the advantages:
Existing Legal Protections Are Insufficient:
1. The federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) cannot prevent activist groups from undermining marriage laws through lawsuits brought in state court in states such as Vermont and Massachusetts. These state lawsuits will lay the foundation for additional lawsuits around the country. For example, over 80% of Vermont so-called civil unions involve out-of-state residents — from every state in the nation — who will file lawsuits to undermine marriage in their respective states. A similar pattern can be expected to apply in Massachusetts.
2. State marriage laws and DOMA are not likely to survive if challenged in court. Although the courts may uphold the federal DOMA as it applies to federal law, they will almost certainly invalidate the section of DOMA that attempts to bar interstate transmission of same-sex marriages. Under the established doctrine of judicial supremacy in matters of constitutional interpretation, this section of DOMA will be viewed as an unconstitutional effort to base an Act of Congress upon a purportedly authoritative interpretation of a constitutional text (the Full Faith and Credit Clause)
Her’s the best solution though: do away with DOMA. Problem solved. The amendment language here is loaded not with constitutional legal dogma but with straw men and question begging. To this point: “The Federal Marriage Amendment is an urgently needed response to the pending judicial destruction of the legal status of marriage in America.” “Juditial destruction” is an inference not a fact, nor does it make much sense since the distinction between legal status as social construction and norm and legal status as political position doesn’t appear to matter. There’s no reference to the legal arguments coming out of the Mass court, which is where the argument should go or be directed toward, not as a political gesture, meant to head off some “destruction” of a “wish.” In the end, the question of DOMA and the above amendment go to the idea of bias and bad consitutional faith, not marriage or “status.”
This is naked politics. Not good, well argued law and policy.
If this were about just legal status and the love of some ideal of marriage, then we’d need a law outlawing divorce.
It seems that Spinning and I share a common enjoyment of Willie Nelson.
She, however, has seen him up close.
Hats off to Neha and Susan for their work on conferences and group work. This leads to a question: where is the school?
Are they learning more by having to scramble for speakers and get people where they need to be, or in their courses? I don’t know. But they’re both building things that other people will use, break, and judge. Is the essay and the requisite work for such things enough: the little writing tasks that will be read by the teacher and marked on, the things that are stacking up in my office that noone wants to come by and grab?
Anticipation, planning, speaking, writing with the risk of laughter. Tough skills to get across in the arbitrary 15 week semester.
Where is the real school? What would William Blake say?
“The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it” (MH&H).