"The oral culture used what the brain was best
adapted for to erect a civilization that existed primarily in the
minds of its members. This was accomplished through the use of the
powerful contextual language we know today as poetry. The use of spoken
language evolved to a high art in which process was indistinguishable from
content." [ italic mine, g.f. ]
--Peter Brown, The Hypnotic
Brain
(1991)
I said "notes" (plural) at the top, so I'll leave
that quote for you to daydream on in the context of all we've been doing with
this making poems like poems sound, rather than how poems (are thought to)
look....
I might start sketching a "third thing"
in 2006, with Waking the Poet and the Interview I did with Jared being the
"first" and "second" things.... Waking's framework was a seminar (hours) in a
book (foreword and afterword), the Interview's was an interview and this'll be
...well, I ain't dreamed that up yet. It'll be digital, probably
surface in Juice online, since all this growing context is there, so
...what do I do to make it not just another eletter? And, not, say
the folios I'm doing. An idea growing. Those folios are just "bound eletters".
Eletters in the browser with a pack of links at the top (some groups of
letters on my site have the pack of links at the bottom, very
casual).
The pages in a folio aren't constrained into a
model, like my hbooks on my site. So, I could do a mini-hbook, pages set like
in my books online. Oh, well, I'm jumping ahead here. Y'see, for me no
distinction between process and content exists. It was what I was trying to
say when I titled a metablab "Art for Art's Sake" and, then, opened with a
tale of Orville and Wilbur. The phrase is a put down. Means if you aren't
doing your art "for" something (to serve the oppressed or Chairman Mao or
Citibank), it's just "empty" activity. But if you aren't doing art for art's
sake it's not going to fly and neither are or whatever you think your art's
for. Oh, well.
But, what we're doing in all this processing, or
playing, of the poem, as a voice will, c'n surely break down that
false "distinction" - and no amount of reading, unless you're jamming when you
read, or being drenched in somebody else's thinking, experiencing and talking,
is going to get your p-poets there.
|
by
old Poto
mac
candidate
jumps
in yo
noises
from
thrashing |
|
And if somebody thought he understood
somebody who understood what "composition by field" meant who didn't know
how the first four syllables in that were reorienting themselves from normal
prose phrasing, in the playing, just as Faraday's "electrical" and "magnetic"
objects generating and responding to "fields" around each other, resolving
then, with the fifth syllable, ye'd have to ask him where, after quoting the
right people, he goes to get some real field phenomena in the interaction of
phonemic "current" and experiential "meaning" to write, and create, a line or
two or five. And in this playing, remember, "sounds / of splashing"
was tensored into "noises / from / thrashing", the humanly meaningful
"noises" being a different order of experience than, oh, say, the more
impersonal "sounds". So, the distinction between the process, what
the (human) voice does, and the content, what's actually set out
for what a listening reader's ear
(human's "making sense" hearing) does ...just fades
away.... And if anybody doesn't get what you did with Corwin's poem
except, maybe, in the last three one-word lines, but after coming back into
the margin, ...well, somebody's at least got a burr placed under his
or her saddling complacency.
I'm not starting in on that "third" thing, except I guess I've been
"started in" for a while, maybe even overlapping with the Interview, which in
about another month will be a year old. But it's taken on shape, gradually, from
way back when we first tried to get MOAPGers to think about line-breaks and you
put a poem, with short lines, live images, up with Enter or Return or whatever
written after each line ...and got all kinds of responses to images and no
comment or seeming notice of the extra word tagged on each line, no comment on
line placement, stacking, shaping, no nothing about how the poem was set down.
aaarrrggghhh.... Blabs, playings with poems, whether my full out Jamming
with the Ballad of Green Sky (and nobody even sensed anything going on
in that name-making) or your playing with Brad's poem which seemingly went over
like a lead balloon. I feel like walking out onto the center of the MOAPG table
and screaming, "Hello! Is anybody awake in here? Why have you all
fallen forward with your faces in your plates? What are those theta
rhythms slopping back and forth in your brains? Why are your legs like the
back-halves of fish?"
Still, it's in doing it that we c'n get a feel for it and
then maybe extract some patterns, articulate 'em, and have some
craft to offer.... Even when people joined in for some jamming, it was
the frogs more than the jamming as a way of presenting 'em. Don't let the
developing picture jump through the bath too quickly, ...oops, dark-room talk.
I'm just doodling, but who knows. There's a little more to the quote I used
to get from yesterday's letter to this one.
"That cultures can be complex and sophisticated solely on the basis of
the spoken word is difficult for us to imagine. Writing so transforms human
consciousness that it takes considerable effort to recognize our literate bias.
Building on the long evolutionary process, the oral culture brought personal
face-to-face communication to its first great elaboration. The oral culture used
what the brain was best adapted for to erect a civilization that existed
primarily in the minds of its members. This was accomplished through the
use of the powerful contextual language we know today as poetry. The use of
spoken language evolved to a high art in which process was indistinguishable
from content. The oral poetry of non-literate cultures forms a close
parallel model to the verbal style of Ericksonian hypnotherapy" [ italic
mine, g.f. ]
I cautioned you against sending Corwin to "investigate" a
sea of
writings, the whole projective, or ejective or adjective "verse" business
without any seafaring skills (or even starting him with, say, my
Credo
and it's annotations, at
http://home.earthlink.net/~acorioso/FJCredo.htm)
and, here, that quote seems to point to far deeper and wilder
seas to
head into, sailing
into pretty strong prevailing winds.... If you're
going to build civilizations, cultures primarily in people's minds, using only
spoken language, or even glimpses of such things, for the duration of, say, a
poem, using heightened contextual language, ...well, you'd better have some
sense of how to get your voice into somebody's head, and how to work "in
there".
Here's Erickson, in a frequently quoted talk to somebody he's guided
to her childhood experiences in what some might call the dream
world: "And my voice goes everywhere with you, and changes into the voice
of your parents, your teachers, your playmates and the voices of the wind and of
the rain...."
And here, from before I'd come across Erickson and his use of language, is
the end of my Return of the Shaman. The whole poem is the first
place-holder for my set of poems in Juice online 2006.
...
Show that mutha
old Coyote is still
o'nery as ever.
& I'll
do some painting
in Earth colors
or in gold leaf, whatever -
with
little whorls
in it -
coriolis
spirit dancers -
&
drink the dark wine
& sing
the wind in high branches
&
sea-wetted rocks
& new places
& I'll get hide-wet
in
the woman's dark arch
& watch for the soft
face
of new
life.
After jamming.... To lead Corwin through a riff, as a
voice plays it, you opened just about every seam in his poem, and writing
it down, you made his poem look like it sounded, as you played it. You used the
techniques we've been playing with for a couple handfuls of months. Some in
MOAPG some more in letters in the Juice squad-room and, some of it embedded in
Juice online 2004, 2005. So, is every poem going to be a kind of dazzling
scatter of those little phonemic figures, the syllables, in some instances
words, even birthings of phrases, maybe...? Nope. These hard-riffs, opening up
everything, are jazz soloists playing cosmic scales. No relations are
snapped. It c'n all go back together. Writing to you guys, Carlos, April, I
wrote a haiku bouncing off Basho's famous
Furu ike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto
Old pond — frogs
jumped in — sound of water.
That's reality jumping into the tranquil mind, most say, and the ripples
from those landings will, in time smooth out. I figured our western mind is
...well, a whole lot more active. Not an old pond, but the whole welkin, the sea
and sky, the heavens, climate and weather....
twisting in the wind
under a lowering sky
a captured grey bird
In our to-and-froing, Carlos pointed out that the Japanese write them
vertically, and it's just how they do it, hanging them, too, on a central
margin, not a left or right margin. Later, I did hang it centrally, but first I
did this bit of line stacking.
twisting
in
the
wind
yo
under
a
lowering
sky
yo
a
captured
grey
bird
For us, writing it vertically is opening it up, playing the notes
purely and distinctly, jamming it. Where Basho marked his main line-break (of
the two with a formal punctuation-syllable, ya, I marked both of mine with a
very Amerish (A-mer'-ish) yo, and didn't enter 'em (they're punctuation marks)
in my count. Playing this, you can't help knowing the key to the whole thing,
the real presence of mind, which in Basho is the pond, is, here,
captured and "captured / grey / bird" is a distinct set of
gusts....
So, can we go back to the, say, three line poem, and that's the
question, for you and Corwin, can Corwin go back to his lined poem, changed or
not, I started with? Sure can. And you can see what ultimately you can
count on getting in your playing the syllables. You see, I play the phonemes,
the phonemic instrument, and so you can see, now, how I'd already gotten those
three distinct gusts to flesh out the twisting: "a captureD Grey BirD" ...three
words as separated down in the phonemic flow as surely as if line breaks were
there....
We all do it, it's the basis of "having an ear" and even novices, living
around the language or languages for a life-time, have it, but this playing the
notes, as a voice would, sure sharpens the player's technique. Sometimes, going
back to lines, you keep some of the lining, like Corwin might keep that ending
three after a long one or one placed out to the right, and sometimes you know
you've got to juggle the phonemic music in a line to match something in that
opened up playing. Here's how I always moved in the good old days...,
CITY HUNT
Long, bleak
heartscapes where i run in
my
vision, lost
as i wake into fog drenched
wallscapes, run
knotted
into trudging
hours long walk, to walk
away the gathered
fires and
howls -
through windows i see the holders
of civilization
arched back,
thrusting
at Diona, bent over a board table, arms
swimming among
fluttering
prospecti,
the holders of culture
zeroing in on
each
other's reared buttocks
while Diona escapes -
and beside her i
run, a few
thrusting holders even fanning wind
trying for my fleeing
butt,
a few spearing at this
in me turning to
leave
figure...
snarling, whining
that i'd move up to the high desert
get
wind burnt, rip
off and wear the Indian's
skin
or
drift back farther in
coriolis
swirls
of
time,
wear mammoth
hide, rip off
the raw boned Siberian's
sighting,
but i
turn
more deeply
the thing in me'd
go
deeper,
farther back,
to be
again
a molecular sentience in primal
soup, the first hot sea, and
rebound
to fling itself
outward
and know wholly
our
galaxies
our
constellar
cities.
Hey, all three of these are going into a folio, the "Hyperzine 06 Sequence"
which is some of the eletters having to do with the transition from 10005 to
2006. In a while, a few more things likely for it, I'll send you, Stephen, a
copy for your eDen. But I just had an idea just for reading pleasure and
ease. I'll make up a little pair that's the one suggesting you do a wrapper and
writing about that and this one. The one between was only about putting in the
"sheets of paper" and the teaser repeated at the top here. Then, if you
like the idea, but aren't spurred to do that wrapper you could put these two as
the top two on the "Items from MOAPG" index-page (I'll have a "continuing" link
on the first one). You need a box at the top telling what "Items from MOAPG" are
going to be showing up. Then, one (or two, linked) that's "how and why"....
Anyway, my voice will go with you, as a voice would,
Gene