i also have a paper which i thought i was going to get finished by tomorrow now, as it turns out, i kind of don't have any other options
BUT
it's going well, and i'm actually feeling quite lucid, noticing a lot of really glaring universal-type LOOK HERE sorts of things within the texts i'm poring over, and part of me is thinking that i'm really, really, really on to something here, and i think very much that regardless of my actual mark on this paper i'm going to ask the prof if he wants to work with me on it so i can turn into something i can maybe shop around for publication.
since i'm actually almost back on schedule after taking a quick break to go move my car so i didn't get ticketed and buy some energy drinks in the process, i'm going to blog what i'm writing about!
in his duino elegies, early 20th-century german lyric poet rainer maria rilke grapples with the not-insignificant question of human purpose on earth; the conclusion he comes to kind of typical for a dude who basically invented his idea of what the poet should be, lived it, and then started writing poetry is that we are here to describe, to codify the world extant and observable and experiential, and then to actually express that description. thus we have: tree, wall, column or arch. we have: man, woman, animal. mountain. acrobat. mother. child. hero.
contemporary (i.e. late 20thC/present early 21stC) poet robert hass' time and materials, a collection of eight years' worth of poetry, grapples, as it happens, with similar concerns; "there are limits to saying, / in language, what the tree did," he writes, before musing: "it is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us." he proposes the problems with words, with naming, with describing, which is that these things all just kind of poke around the essence of a thing. they are structures to help us codify and analyse and understand a vast universe made up of things that we ultimately actually don't have the ability to express, not on their fundamental levels. instead, we have words, and increasing details of those words we have red, but also "ribbon on the cocked straw hat / of the girl with pooched-out lips", "fire... blood welling from a cut", "flecks of poppy in the tar-grass scented summer air," "rouged nipple, mouth" which all serve to push inwards and bring us not to the unsayable essence of existing things but to their boundaries, to the things that language is ultimately capable of describing.
if that all sounds familiar, it is it goes all the way back to classical thought. aristotle described mimesis, the act of imitation; the crux of what i'm saying, basically, is that this desire to express the boundaries of the inexpressible is fundamentally a mimetic function, the very core of our existence. rilke wasn't fucking around when he said that's our purpose. aristotle, centuries previous, described mimesis as something effectively hardwired into us. he said that mimesis was an imitation of the real, and where rilke and hass further complicate that is by illustrating that the imitation of the real requires us to imitate what tangibly exists and what is describable, in an attempt to become a true representation of the unsayable. it is a futile project, because the unsayable is fundamentally un-, but in language and in codifying and in description in mimesis we at least understand their tangible and unsayable parts; poetry is about giving into both the knowledge of the unsayable and the urge to imitate it anyways.
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Topic: Re: Blog Thread IIIa : Look Who's Blogging Now (Read 270860 times)