Alles klar, danke schoen Christopher!
(Everything clear, thank you)

but as Galileo Galilei commented,
"... still it moves".

About glasses,
to put them on an oblique surface and carelessly let them fall, is as
"stupid" as throwing them away.
Thus,
_mea maxima culpa_
take care, Rea anny

From: "Christopher Walker" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>


> Anny:
>
> Dropping your glasses is a reasonable, if unfortunate, unintended thing to
> do. So my commiserations in return. Your tolerance of a man so stupid that
> he throws his own glasses away is appreciated. Last night I went out to
look
> for them; I thought I'd dropped them in the pond. On my return, I found
that
> the frogs had been going in the opposite direction...
>
> You _are_, I think, misreading the points I tried to make.
>
> <snip>
> I am particularly referring to [AB]:
>
> _At the end of your journey, you'd have discovered
> a solution that was there before you started._ [CW]
> <snip>
>
> Here I refer to the extent to which we're _conscious_ of what we do. We
may
> not be, particularly: 'Taking a nap, I pound the rice', as the koan has
it.
> And, implicitly, I'm also suggesting a mode of thinking which is (if you
> will) holistic rather than (as I put it) along the lines of a car assembly
> plant. (Boo! Hiss!)
>
> This has nothing, of itself, to do with anything pre-ordained.
>
> To address Alison's comments about how we _feel_ in writing and whether
it's
> any sort of guide, I went on to explore my observation using two different
> models: the maze and the garden path sentence.
>
> The maze was my illustration of what Alison called 'an algorithmic model
for
> writing poetry'. Here the iterations (what one might call the realisation
of
> the work) are the result of navigating a pre-existing structure: form, in
> other words, comes first.
>
> There is, I think, an argument (which I don't entirely buy) that the
> audience receives the finished artwork to some degree in that way. (This
is
> what I take Rebecca to mean when she refers to 'a reading of the text
rather
> than one's self', even though my own preference would be for a reading
> _licensed_ by the text: both...and... plus..., not either/or.) But as a
> model of *creation* it is, I think, inadequate if not simply wrong.
>
> Here, I suspect, we may agree.
>
> I then used garden path sentences as a loose analogy to suggest my
> preferred alternative, something freer and quite open (they could go on
and
> on) in which attempts at parsing produce quite dramatic effects upon
> presuppositions. Remembering always that the semantic problems are only an
> analogy for something more dimensioned and that I'm looking at things
> from the *creator's* point of view, it may be that this sculpting of
> attention (the taking of choices, the marking out of choices) proceeds
> towards a purpose with which one started out. In this sense experience
> precedes form, though not in time necessarily, as Dickinson's 'great pain'
> precedes 'a formal feeling', and that the poem (in the sense of purposeful
> attention) is uncovered as a whole but in more detail (rather as we see
> better with our glasses on) instead of being 'created' bit by bit.
>
> But poetry is so various. That there are other possible models goes, I
hope,
> without saying. Though I have said it now.
>
> <snip>
> And what also interests me in what you are saying is [AB]:
>
> _Do we perhaps, in 'expressing ourselves', respond to the exigencies of
> something beyond and prior to language in all its definition?_ [CW]
>
> Which allows for the possibility of reading a certain fatalism in it. [AB]
> <snip>
>
> Again I'm trying to say the same(ish) several things, and not particularly
> well. To say we 'respond to the exigencies of something beyond and
prior...'
> is not so very different from saying that in cooking supper I not only
> respond to the perceived needs of my household (hunger, nourishment et al)
> but also cope with the constraints of what's in the larder and what I am
> able to do. So spit roasted ox is out, but that Alleppey fish curry
> involving coconut and green mango we both used to like on summer evenings
> still remains a possibility.
>
> The hungry mouths, the raw food and the recipe aren't a blueprint for what
> will happen. They are partly what one brings to bear in cooking, partly
what
> cooking bears upon and partly the context in which one cooks, what a
> relevance theorist such as Sperber would call the 'cognitive environment'
> where writing and language are concerned.
>
> <snip>
> Still (by following the Romantic school) ... those higher spheres to which
> only poetry can accede.
> <snip>
>
> Our view of Romanticism is to Romanticism what scientism is to Science, if
> that's not much too rude!
>
> <snip>
> Or that dissolving of the "anchor points" as John Kinsella defines them,
> within one single poem where "ambiguity becomes increasingly larger".
> <snip>
>
> Now what would be a principled explanation for why we value ambiguity in
> poetry but not (say) in telling the truth? I don't have any answer to that
> question; but I have been trying to clear away some of the defensive
> ravelins with which we surround ourselves (I hope).
>
> CW