In the first place, I'd love to know, Paul, why do you call yourself "egg".
I am very happy to accept your chosen sub-entry, but am becoming
increasingly
curious about its intimate reference to your personal  reality.

To reply to your post,  I would like to say that poetry has little to do
with the idea- illusion, search-quest,
desire-hunger for civilization & community . Such concepts apply only
marginally to
the reasons which are behind creation. To recall Chomski, as you did, one
might say that  poetry
can indeed embody both the I-language and the E-language,
can indeed draw inspiration from the mind-mechanisms as much as from social
contexts
but, I say, cannot be asked to participate in a formal
justification-explanation of civilization.

"Community " today is created by the sharing of interests and needs, mainly.
We have lost almost completely the
extra-meaning which had in the past.
Modernity has not only created the illusion in people to be self-sufficient,
but eliminated all the extra-justification for the gathering of humans
beyond the mere satisfaction of urgencies.
 We gather in communities by necessity
(we cannot emigrate yet to Mars and the only escape, as far as I am
concerned,  from this world is still death)
and feel confined within our own community as we would do if put in a
prison.
As for me, my exiled condition is what pleases me most.
I like to have in the back of my mind, and only there, the roots of my own
language and culture, of my own
I-language and my I-people as they reside in me, but only as a sort of "lead
narrative", something I am quite happy not having to deal with daily.

I use English as a medium of communication with greater pleasure than I use
my Latin. It helps me in obtaining
tickets and  food. It is devoided of spirituality and power and I can feel
happy knowing that whatever I say
serves the sole purpose of satisfying my functions at their barest state. I
even try to write poems in this alien language, but I have no responsibility
towards the results.
Yet I have written very moving poems, in (Latin). My people like them and
prize me a lot. They read me and even quote me, as often non-poets do with
the work of poets (but all this ...far away, as if in another world, in
another age, almost).
I do not want to be bothered with this aspect of my internalized language. I
let my  creative inputs drop like cold drops, or lead bullets. I can only
speak about myself, and I know that when I write a poem, I do it rationally
and I do not think for a moment about my community, I only think and I am
concerned about the shape that words assume on the page and the way they are
going to sound, once read aloud. I try to make the formal language change in
my hands and conform to my projects. That's it.  I do not wish to write a
good poem about good neighborhood and let it read to my nasty next-door Lady
to move her to compassion for me and knock at my door with a plate of her
famous  almond cakes.

Yet, I can sincerely  weep on a poem by Hardy for its lyrical qualities and
its social values.
These qualities do not belong to the real world I have left behind and which
I do not wish to have back.
They belong to an idealized universalized context, to the sphere of ideas
and entities.
And Hardy's realism is what sound most  magic,   to my foreign ear. You
might see this as a reductionist impulse. Maybe yes, and deals with platonic
spheres (so it is much more inclined towards the concept of civilization
than towards the factual creation or acknowledgement of community in
concrete terms).
It horrifies me to belong to a community, to have to deal with the brains of
my comrades.
(Joking!!!)

We do not want to ask poetry to come out and make truth claims.
Poetry can only create mere hypothesis of civilization, but  not
communities,
it cannot answer for the outcomes of the actual coming together of the
humans as we presently are,
say a waste dominion of  bourgeoisies, progressively devoided, against our
will or abilities, of taboos and
conformism, and yet  enabled - against our will and abilities - to create
what it is now our civilization:
in other words, a real fullness of nothingness,  which is around us. The
concept is not equivocal.
Poetry can participate to the world but has no strength, no power to
determine changes
in any real direction. But this final reflexion of mine is only relatively
important, and we as poets keep writing.

Pseudo-Susanna


> It would be one thing if the UN resolution meant 'nothing', semiotic
> slippage designed to allow 'other' voices. A kind of Derridarian strategy.
> But it's not. It is purposefully proposing the impossible by blandly
> conflating time and space the better to hoodwink, denude and enclose. Like
> the idea that we are all looking now for 'community', leaving out any
> difference between communities of resistance or acceptance. I'm neither a
> linguist or Anarchist but I suggest Chomsky and bargepoles. I think
'working
> from the inside' sits ill here.
>
>
> paul
>
>
>
>
>


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