Christopher:
<snip>
There isn't really a workaround for *ownership*, given the starting topic.
So do we atomise it, along the lines of film credits? Name by Mr & Mrs
Ramsbottom, assisted by Stanley Holloway; language by Sheila Ramsbottom and
William Shakespeare; concept by Mrs Fitzpatrick of Oldham Comprehensive;
metrical advice by Ernest Dowson, and so on?
<snap>
Which still begs a question, as by pushing a series back, whether in
philosophy or physics, we still arrive the unanswered and unanswerable
matter of the First Cause. Unanswerable as identity.
I do know about the pedigree of essentialism, while I don't think it's a
matter of poetry having anything to fear from theory, it's just that I
feel-think that poetry thinks more comprehensively than literary theory. Its
roots are bi-cameral. To expand that though would require an essay,
including an investigation of the modal nature of intelligence and
linguistic operations which I have no intention of committing here.
I have not long received a most striking missive from one Ernesto Che
Pessoa, which I suspect indicates that statements on this list have had the
result of radicalising Sheila Ramsbottom. Beware!
Best
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Leicester, England
Home Page
A Chide's Alphabet
Painting Without Numbers
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/index.htm
----- Original Message -----
From: "Christopher Walker" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, March 08, 2002 1:12 AM
Subject: Re: authorships (2)
Dave:
<snip>
I get this word 'essentialism' aired in my vicinity now and then. Oddly, one
or two others, whose 'positions' appear akin to mine occasionally receive
the same warning word. Whatever ever that 'position' is. [DB]
<snip>
'Positions' is your invention; but 'essentialism' wasn't mine. Properly
essentialism was to distinguish between *essence* and *appearance* (Locke's
*nominal* and *real*, for example). As I use(d) and (more or less) defined
it, and you of course ('I'm too preoccupied contingently to tell') already
know, essentialism means treating qualities apprehensible through appearance
or by subjective judgement (such as 'green' or 'brilliance') as though they
independent entities rather than attributes and constructs. So not being
'essentialist' means no absolute pomposity. Just the inferior, contingent
stuff. Motes in the eye of the beholder, and all that.
Rather than warning you off, I was looking at two contrasting approaches to
ownership and creativity. In my travesty of each, your model boiled down to
a truism: 'if you take what is mine I've been robbed'. But Searle's
(extended) didn't boil at all: the unanswered questions simply multiplied.
And that interested me. For you, anything definable as *creativity* had to
be subsumed under *brilliance*. In Searle (extended), it had to be packed
into *understanding*. But suppose these terms no longer matter after all.
Searle's model begins to look very odd, because people are now 'machines'.
And 'machines' begin to seem rather mysterious in their turn. Yours
continues to _look_ convincing - but only because your other concept
(*ownership*) hasn't been defined.
There isn't really a workaround for *ownership*, given the starting topic.
So do we atomise it, along the lines of film credits? Name by Mr & Mrs
Ramsbottom, assisted by Stanley Holloway; language by Sheila Ramsbottom and
William Shakespeare; concept by Mrs Fitzpatrick of Oldham Comprehensive;
metrical advice by Ernest Dowson, and so on? If I render Montale's 'Non so
come stremata tu resisti / in questo lago / d'indifferenza ch'è il tuo
cuore' (roughly 'I can't think how you manage, exhausted / in this lake / of
indifference that is your heart', from *Dora Markus*) into something
'brilliant', is it mine, Montale's or even (given the image) Dante's? You
raised exactly this issue with respect to Presley only to kill it off again
by saying that 'most of Elvis' early songs were ripped off without payment
from black rural singers'.
The extended Searle interested me because it helps to overcome the
conceptual division between, on the one hand, anonymous folk poets (I don't
really believe in them; collaboration, of any sort, proceeds by negotiation
and complicity, I suspect) and 'inspired' and/or technically skilled
_individuals_, on the other. Which is why I quoted Robin. And meaning/non
meaning is at least as complex a binary as owned/not owned. My conversation
with Erminia (to whose second post I'd really meant to reply) was around one
aspect of this.
<snip>
I find it most curious: the word [essentialism], as employed, has a certain
Olympian air to my senses. Or perhaps I'm responding to a certain prevailing
tone of debate,
<snip>
Or possibly tilting at molehills. See my comments on contingency above.
Poetry has nothing to fear from Theory, I believe. Certainly not from mine,
such as it is.
Christopher Walker
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