I'm afraid my fishing adventures are rather sad, Kent, and involved
my casting the reel into the water or catching the hook in my jumper.
Though once I did catch a fish, to my and everybody else's enormous
surprise.
But I love the evocations of the idea of a net set in the turbulence;
and indeed, it must always be put there by someone. The notion of
poetry as a human activity is among the more poignant of its
significances to me; much as, when looking at a favourite painting,
what I notice is the amazing and banal fact that someone painted it,
and there, right in front of me, are the traces of the brush
strokes... And yes, meaning, whatever it is, is enormously mysterious
to me.
Best
Alison
>Doug Barbour asked, in response to my proposal that poetry
>cannot "sometimes" contain meaning, but must, in fact, either
>*always* contain it or *never* contain it, said,
>
>>I have to ask everyone, what means 'contains'?
>
>When I wrote the post, I meant "contain" not in the sense of
>holding back or obstructing, but in the banal sense of a receptacle
>bearing its contents. Meaning would *always* be "contained" in
>poems if one assumes a Romantic notion of meaning, or even a
>later New Critical one; meaning would *never* be "contained" in
>poems if one assumes a structuralist notion of meaning in the
>sense of language being a system of differences with no positive
>terms, or even a later, late Wittgensteinian notion. In the former,
>meaning inheres, and is present prior to the reader or speaker; in
>the latter, meaning is constructed via complex negotiations of
>social and cultural rules. That's a pedestrian reduction of issues
>that are ho-hum to everyone here by now, which is not to say that
>the issue has been decided by anyone anywhere, of course (thank
>goodness).
>
>But when Doug B. asked what is meant by "contains," it made me
>think: Maybe both those senses are unsatisfactory, and that it *is*,
>actually, more interesting to think of a poem's relationship to
>meaning in the sense of "holding back or obstructing," the text
>considered as a kind of gauze or net against which meaning
>gathers, clots, arranges and disarranges itself according to rather
>random cultural forces and flows? Here's an analogy: I fish for trout
>in small streams, and sometimes I put a little net attached to two
>sticks into the current for a minute or two to see what insects wash
>into it. I'm wondering if a poem could be thought of in that way-- as
>a little language-net inserted at a particular point in the
>semiotic/culture stream (the little net is a collection of empty black
>symbols on a page that "mean" nothing of themselves), and the
>moment the little net is inserted at that particular juncture in the
>turbulence, many strange, different things begin to accrete there.
>
>For this to happen, of course, there must be a fisherperson to
>insert the net, and this is where and why meaning in poetry seems
>to me to be an either/or question, where *never* and *always* take
>turns, oscillating in and out, depending on (it sounds obvious to
>say it, but it's not the conventional view) *whether or not someone
>is there*, putting something net-like into the flow. I think what I'm
>suggesting goes to what Alison was saying in a recent post where
>she commented on what I'd initially said to Chris: I understood her
>to say that meaning is brought forth or configured by embodied
>minds in interaction with a world that minds are always and already
>embedded within, a view phenomenological in spirit, even quantum,
>at least in its broad principles, and one that I sympathize with. But
>that view, far from providing answers, just makes "meaning" and its
>containers more mysterious in the end.
>
>Kind of babbling here, to the best of my current ability.
>
>Kent
--
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
Masthead online
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