April,
Delighted to be part of your morning, Friday.
Since we visited at dinner, of course, I needn't reply except to share
your reply to my forwarded copy of my letter to Judy with the squad. I
have your note and what I added above the Judy-letter when forwarding to
you. Your coming back with the language I used is what's modeled, of
course, is your using language I provide. Of course, I've
harangued you with it for years, most recently when we have a breakfast
(when you work into evening) or dinner (when you stay late in the
afternoon) over at Fat Apple's in El Cerrito. Shades of ancient café days
with life at the other tables, people passing among the tables so I lean
back and watch somebody's progress as I ...well, harangue.
At the next
table, a copy of Small Is Beautiful
is devoured, the ecto-
morphic student ripping
whole mouthfuls
of page and cover,
grinding it to pulp in his masticating jaws,
diluting it with
saliva, swallowing
it whole, or
in cheek-stuffing gobs,
and I hump over my little
fourth world terrain, my
circle world, my magus'
realm, busily
consecrating and banishing
the humming, burr-winged
creations that hover
about, or dart
into, my tiny self-helping
world, my cottage industry
landscape, and
I look to the other islands,
the humped over citizenry
- each of us dreaming
of rough technologies
to import.
table, a copy of Small Is Beautiful
is devoured, the ecto-
morphic student ripping
whole mouthfuls
of page and cover,
grinding it to pulp in his masticating jaws,
diluting it with
saliva, swallowing
it whole, or
in cheek-stuffing gobs,
and I hump over my little
fourth world terrain, my
circle world, my magus'
realm, busily
consecrating and banishing
the humming, burr-winged
creations that hover
about, or dart
into, my tiny self-helping
world, my cottage industry
landscape, and
I look to the other islands,
the humped over citizenry
- each of us dreaming
of rough technologies
to import.
I'd likely have left my post to stand by
itself, at least through the winter. But, Dean's response about the "blood
red" line and my realization that "format" was as serious as "drafts" for
making the use of memory and imagination static rather than
dynamic. If it was just that I hadn't commented on the idea of
formatting rather than line-making and line-placing being a shaping
field (force), I'd have left the "draft[ing]s" seed to do it's work.
I rarely do what needs doing and shut up. So, I tossed in the
suggesture about holding that "high // in Berkeley hills" for the
end, where Judy repeats it, and, at the beginning to dump a
listening (for the full linguistic music) reader right from the
title, which is all the "locator" for the scene the poet needs, right into
the thistles. Later, after what's seen, we c'n get the "high". And,
because it's how m' quirky brain is wired, I couldn't help but make my
remark about the etching.... This was another seed to be
tamped into the skullpot soil and left to sprout or not.
But, among the responses, most of which are
the usual "free association", was Dean's about the "blood red" used with
the drawing made by the scratching implements. Intelligent, but
usual comments about redundancies, which, true enough
can tie up rather than elicit imagination. Dean said she didn't
need "blood", "red" being enough. Actually, you could keep either, and
blood might be the better one to keep, "blood / drawing" rather than
simply "red drawing" (which pulls up the sense of blood, maybe,
IF "scratch" is still in short-term).... Or you c'n drop
both.
But I had to remind about the music.
You might want the redundant, even the heavily redundant, and that is a
heavy line. I gave possibilities for the heavily played "blood
red" as foreseeing a sunset, a very dramatic one, or, looking inward, a
"terrible close up". The old approach to looking at the surface language,
coupled with the already confessed thinking in terms of "format" not "line
placement", meant I had to rescue my poor seed (where
seed is a past participial form of "see", but see too in
need of expanding into "sense"...) from a static world and place it,
again, in a dynamic world. We need hyperzining in our
language playing. Dean's looking at language in a static,
formatted, all at once "sheet of music", way would constrain any potential
riffing.
Going back over drafts should be at least
reading through them as they (still) are, if not again writing
them out (even if you have to paste and then copy to do that, then erasing
the pasted one) so you have both playings live in the work session. The TV
trick of showing windows with live video in them, angling, maybe making up
the dies of a box seen in perspective, but all the "scenes" live, gives us
an image. I counterpointed all that I was saying by including the
Thinking point on Bucky's distortion free map because we get the
making in an all at once or Mozartian model. The unfolding, of
course, is dynamic. But the idea of a shaped shell around the globe, an
icosahedron that's then unfolded. Cartographers improved their
situation by rolling the sheet into a tube around the globe. They had the
trick then, do something with the sheet. Why they didn't go on to consider
the closed figure with the shaping, that is the multitude of little plane
areas on it, and then separating along seams so as to get areas you are
interested in using all in the "undivided" area, is a puzzle. Why do we
push our exploratory doings to a certain point and stop? They rolled up
their plane. They were already taking it out of it's plane space. They
likely did that unconsciously because they always rolled up their maps
for storage (in sheaths). Map makers however were not model makers.
Even kids knew about making a "solid" tetrahedron by drawing four
triangles sharing "edges", cutting it out, folding it up and fastening the
"divided edges". Bucky brought map-making and model-making together and
filled in our imaginary activities. He keeps the idea of projecting from a
curved surface onto a flat surface, but imagines omnidirectional
projection. I could tie the thinking point into the letter by use of
a concept of omnisensorial projection to allow for a seemingly
all-at-once "formatting" with the music coming, then, in an
unfolding. Coming at the "riffing" from another
direction.
Well, enough of this. I'll tuck it, too, into
the folio.
