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Post by ellaadkins on Jan 9, 2023 14:06:23 GMT -5
This poem, to me, is arguing for an embrace of the liminal, the in between, the transitional and the unknown.
Retallack's discussion of memory is complex, since the way I understand memory is these sites of experience in our consciousness that in their inception/original storage, are pure and present, since they haven't been analyzed and re-remembered, but rather they are just pure experience. This purity of the original memory may be what Retallack is referencing when she says "syllables not yet squandered into pliant affirmations". In other words, memories in their pure remembrance, haven't been mined for the truth yet and are the most organic source for pure expression of thought/life/art (i.e. the fine stock of syllables not having been tainted by analysis and meaning making).
The word 'yearning' has a desperate use in this piece, since Retallack uses it as an adjective to describe this scrambling tendency that humans/human society has to find truth of existence in all things, which almost kills the beauty/happiness/presentness of things itself (i.e. the smile being deformed by those conjured throughs).
Her call for the space-time bracket of a collective dreaming of organisms, is what brings me back to my initial point that this poem is arguing for the embrace of the liminal. Dream space is a space that exposes to us, in arguably the most unexpected, unprecedented, unknowable ways, our experiences/emotions/state. The be in a state of dream is not to pyschoanalyze, compartmentalize, or mine for the truth: it is a space to float, and bathe in the unknown, the half known, the deja vu, the ever morphing, which perhaps Retallack is saying is the most interesting and worthwhile locus to create art from.
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Post by Jason Luz on Jan 10, 2023 16:10:28 GMT -5
In “None Too Soon,” what sort of concept of memory can be discerned from this: “Located in memories without precedent, fine stock of syllabus not yet squandered in pliant affirmation”? And this: “Hard to forget what’s never been known for sure.” It makes me think of memory as a constant re-creation, the violable nature of memory. The possibility that every time we conjure a memory it's not some pristine artifact that we can access but it's entwined with all that's gone on after it as well as now and its present conditions, further muddled or complicated. Maybe even with those unusual people that have photographic memories, it's just a surface image, the barest details rather than the complex nest of contexts. It's like Frost's road not taken, way leading onto way, not the counterfactuals but the very materiality of life's choices.
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Post by Siobhan on Jan 10, 2023 17:48:33 GMT -5
This poem comes across to me a little like a group of aphorisms. I'm not sure its' a poem but I guess anything goes. I get from it that perhaps all thoughts are memories because it's all been thought before. Yet a memory without precedent is a thought that floats in the brain not connected to anything; with no source or origin. And don't we waste so many syllables, think of all the wasted syllables in the world, and throughout history. Yet these syllables have not been squandered yet. What could they be? "Hard to forget what's never been known for sure." Things we cannot know. Things that are just outside our grasp. We can't forget them because we've never known them. It sort of makes me think of the story about the South American Natives who didn't see the ships coming with the Conquistadors because they had never imagined anything like them. And probably had never imagined the savagery they brought with them. When I read about yearning minds changing the musculature of determined smiles I think that yearning can not be concealed no matter how determined we are to smile. And the space/time bracket in which animals, minerals and vegetables sometimes dream makes me think of how everything is connected and how we share everything, which brings me back to the fact that there are really no new thoughts; thoughts we have are always shared somewhere with someone or something else.
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Post by Laura De Bernardi on Jan 10, 2023 18:04:22 GMT -5
"Located in memories without precedent...": Taking the expression 'without precedent' first. It refers to an event that has not happened before, whereas memory is established consequent to an event and is complex. There are various forms of memory: procedural, sensory, short/long term. Perception for instance involves memory. The brain sees an object and accesses its memory to perceive/call that particular object a tree. The brain stores vast amounts of data which are constantly being accessed as we move about the world. It's the mammalian brain at work. Two planes crashing into New York skyscrapers was 'without precdent'. I suspect that part of the shock that people experience and continue to endure when cataclysmic events occur involves not having any memory by which to categorise, understand and emotionally resolve the event. I wonder whether there are forms of joy which are 'without precedent'. Taking LSD, having one's first baby, one's first sexual experience...? Although all three could induce shock if the outcomes are tragic, involving psychosis, the death of the baby or rape. But even if the experiences are pleasurable, you'd have to argue that the brain is already encoded to experience birth, sex, but not perhaps LSD. Then there's the use of the word 'located'. What is 'located' in an event that has not happened before? I would have to answer, shock, which the brain responds to with sophisticated mechanisms that are way beyond conscious control. It's hard to consider shock as being a "fine stock of syllabus" - ie an established course of action that has been learned and has led to 'pliant affirmation,' ie, subservient validation. My guess is that what's being expressed is a nice idea. It reminds me of meditation instructions of the kind: During walking meditation walk like a baby, as if you are walking for the first time. That too is a nice idea, but since the brain is in a massive stage of development when the body is learning to walk, there is no way a fully developed adult brain can get anywhere close to 'walking as if for the first time.' It's a concept that's being invoked, and people can duly imagine the concept and think that they are doing something important, and have touched some kind of primal nature within themselves, and have a wow experience of Buddha nature, whatever that is.
What happens then? People chase these wow experiences, involving some kind of imaginative, transcendent reality, and often get themselves into all kinds of bother in their 'real' lives. It is for this reason that some meditation teachers now eschew anything that gets even close to transcendent experience, and do all they can to ground people in their actual experience, which is usually much more messy, confusing, complex, 'real', and harder to interrogate. I'm not saying that I want to live in a state of 'pliant affirmation.' Far from it. But I question whether truly creative experience can be accessed in the ways that Retallack believes is possible, via a concept of memory without precedent.
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Post by Greg Colburn on Jan 10, 2023 21:27:26 GMT -5
None Too Soon starts broad and then narrows to one idea—dreaming. Because I sometimes understand things better when I go from narrow to broad, I flipped the poem and paraphrased each sentence, starting from the last. I got a wonderful message of hope and encouragement. Here is one potential paraphrase—last sentence first— go ahead and dream dreaming is the most worthwhile thing you can do dreams change the rigid pay attention to your dreams when they recur don’t be afraid to act on your dreams, no one is noticing your mistakes where are your dreams? Look inside the thoughts you haven’t had before, the thoughts made with unused pieces of yourself dreams may feel like they cannot be chased, but they can, it is not too soon Nice work.
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Post by jimlynch on Jan 10, 2023 23:55:43 GMT -5
Philosophical Investigations into “None Too Soon”
1a) Where is memory located, where is it stored in the body? Are memories remembered? Does a memory exist of what never happened? Is the mind full of memories? Mindful of them? Careful with them? Do memories blend? Do memories grow from seed? Is a memory without precedent a deja vu? Are you a memory of someone else? A memory of a memory? If time is a circle what is remembering who? Where do memories go?
1a-b) Memories are wasted on the young. Memories are wanting in the young. Memories age like a fine wine if not scattered like grapes before swine.
1b) Ah, but the young come from fine seed, good family, no famine of gathered sound-bites, no spilled seed here: there is no place like Om, a vibrating Oui, firm sound to stand on. Yes. Yesterday. Memory of Yesterday bent, fold after fold, or as Ezra Pound says, “Ply over ply” (Canto 4), layer of sounds upon sound made firm: is the world a memory made of syllables? What language family has the finest stock of syllables?
2) Don't be scarce with time, don't be scarred by time. Is memory a scar in time? Don't look down from the top of the scar. Shear luck would have it in the hands of Pan.
3) The more something doesn't exist the more it persists. Would you count on it? No sure bet. Pascal's dilemma and the Poethical Wager. No choice. [see epigram to and pg 45 of “The Poethical Wager” essay] No will free? Pay your blues. Count your blessings. Don't count on them. How many memories are there all total? How many of them are mistakes? Do false memories count? Are false memories still memories? Are gods that don't exist more than others merely sounds not yet uttered? Thought-forms not yet thought?
4) I've never been known for sure to forget. Hard to remember what's always been unknown. Forget hardness, we want softness, pliancy. To have our way with memory. Easy to remember what's vague. It's the non-existent gods that are hardly remembered at all. Forge ahead. And don't forget the foregone conclusion (without precedent).
Interlude) None, without, not yet, Don't, non-existent, never. Located, affirmation, counting, known, conjure, worthwhile, experiment, aware, construct, are.
5) Do memories exist in the muscles? According to Oscar Ichazo, memories of childhood trauma and fears can be stored in the muscles, and these feelings/memories/ tensions can be released by massage techniques. Wilhelm Reich had taught a similar theory of muscular armouring and the blockage of energy caused by repressed emotions, etc. Thoughts bound to occur. Thoughts bound to limited perspective. Prometheus bound to the rocks and Pandora's Box. Yearning to learn too much and exiled from Eden. Summon a thought, conjure a witness in a case without precedent. That gag order is hard to forget. Bring the teacher an apple. Bound and determined. Thoughts bound and thought flow. If the Lucretian swerve caused the first thought, the first choice, the first option between yes and no, was it an accident? Is choice determined? Are accidents free? Is every memory preordained after the fact open to speculation? No choice Jonah or Free Willy. Does that let loose a smile?
6) H.P. Lovecraft's “ short story “A Color out of Time” is about a meteorite from space that contains an alien color not known to man. His novella The Shadow out of Time is about an alien, extraterrestial race who can switch bodies and minds with other species. Why look for alien life anywhere else but in front of us. Mineral, rock, plants, vegetables. Can we know what it's like to be a stone, a blade of grass? Bergson's theory of Multiplicity: “a qualitative multiplicity consists in a temporal heterogeneity, in which “several conscious states are organized into a whole, permeate one another, [and] gradually gain a richer content” (Time and Free Will, pp. 76-77)” [from the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]. Is this fantasy, can we ever “know” the “other”?? Are rocks and plants conscious? Does broccoli scream when boiled in water? (See The Secret Life of Plants by Tomkins and Bird). Does a stone feel pain when crushed? In Poethical Wager, Retallack often mentions John Cage's decision not to try to imitate nature (to inhabit, to experience the experience of the “other”?) but to imitate “her manner of operation” (Retallack p 189). To dream along with nature. We can all dream. Bracket or no bracket. Logical or Irrational. Philip K. Dick asked “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Is everything intelligent? As Retallack explores through Bohr and Wittgenstein in “What is Experimental Poetry and Why Do We Need It?”, the question remains: are there “limits of understanding” or only limits of language?
- Jim Lynch
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Post by Siobhan on Jan 11, 2023 8:09:20 GMT -5
I am a student but it won't let me log into the forum. Why is that? I'm pretty sure I'm registered for the ModPo. I take it every year since 2014. I don't know if it's always called me guest - I never noticed before.
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Post by siobhan on Jan 11, 2023 8:14:51 GMT -5
Never mind I just registered.
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Post by vijaya on Jan 14, 2023 23:45:19 GMT -5
The title of this one contains JR's sense of how this kind of writing is so necessary at this juncture in the history of language and the history of the world where the concerns are no longer contained within the borders of countries. We are connected in a complex, chaotic world. This sounds like some kind of a gentle nudge to writers to be brave and venture into the messy, connected world out there. She says in the Poethical Wager, ' Your poethical work begins when you no longer wish to shape materials (words, visual elements, sounds) into legitimate progeny of your own poetics' Is she asking the writer to get out of looking at the world from the narrow viewpoint of the individual self? We are scared to let go of our subjective perspectives, we love our pet opinions and viewpoints. In light of this idea of hers, animal, mineral, vegetable -dreaming can be seen in the light of ecology and climate change. Now is the time to be humbler in our treatment of Nature.
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Post by cat mccredie on Jan 20, 2023 23:03:12 GMT -5
Philosophical Investigations into “None Too Soon” 1a) Where is memory located, where is it stored in the body? Are memories remembered? Does a memory exist of what never happened? Is the mind full of memories? Mindful of them? Careful with them? Do memories blend? Do memories grow from seed? Is a memory without precedent a deja vu? Are you a memory of someone else? A memory of a memory? If time is a circle what is remembering who? Where do memories go? 1a-b) Memories are wasted on the young. Memories are wanting in the young. Memories age like a fine wine if not scattered like grapes before swine. 1b) Ah, but the young come from fine seed, good family, no famine of gathered sound-bites, no spilled seed here: there is no place like Om, a vibrating Oui, firm sound to stand on. Yes. Yesterday. Memory of Yesterday bent, fold after fold, or as Ezra Pound says, “Ply over ply” (Canto 4), layer of sounds upon sound made firm: is the world a memory made of syllables? What language family has the finest stock of syllables? 2) Don't be scarce with time, don't be scarred by time. Is memory a scar in time? Don't look down from the top of the scar. Shear luck would have it in the hands of Pan. 3) The more something doesn't exist the more it persists. Would you count on it? No sure bet. Pascal's dilemma and the Poethical Wager. No choice. [see epigram to and pg 45 of “The Poethical Wager” essay] No will free? Pay your blues. Count your blessings. Don't count on them. How many memories are there all total? How many of them are mistakes? Do false memories count? Are false memories still memories? Are gods that don't exist more than others merely sounds not yet uttered? Thought-forms not yet thought? 4) I've never been known for sure to forget. Hard to remember what's always been unknown. Forget hardness, we want softness, pliancy. To have our way with memory. Easy to remember what's vague. It's the non-existent gods that are hardly remembered at all. Forge ahead. And don't forget the foregone conclusion (without precedent). Interlude) None, without, not yet, Don't, non-existent, never. Located, affirmation, counting, known, conjure, worthwhile, experiment, aware, construct, are. 5) Do memories exist in the muscles? According to Oscar Ichazo, memories of childhood trauma and fears can be stored in the muscles, and these feelings/memories/ tensions can be released by massage techniques. Wilhelm Reich had taught a similar theory of muscular armouring and the blockage of energy caused by repressed emotions, etc. Thoughts bound to occur. Thoughts bound to limited perspective. Prometheus bound to the rocks and Pandora's Box. Yearning to learn too much and exiled from Eden. Summon a thought, conjure a witness in a case without precedent. That gag order is hard to forget. Bring the teacher an apple. Bound and determined. Thoughts bound and thought flow. If the Lucretian swerve caused the first thought, the first choice, the first option between yes and no, was it an accident? Is choice determined? Are accidents free? Is every memory preordained after the fact open to speculation? No choice Jonah or Free Willy. Does that let loose a smile? 6) H.P. Lovecraft's “ short story “A Color out of Time” is about a meteorite from space that contains an alien color not known to man. His novella The Shadow out of Time is about an alien, extraterrestial race who can switch bodies and minds with other species. Why look for alien life anywhere else but in front of us. Mineral, rock, plants, vegetables. Can we know what it's like to be a stone, a blade of grass? Bergson's theory of Multiplicity: “a qualitative multiplicity consists in a temporal heterogeneity, in which “several conscious states are organized into a whole, permeate one another, [and] gradually gain a richer content” ( Time and Free Will, pp. 76-77)” [from the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]. Is this fantasy, can we ever “know” the “other”?? Are rocks and plants conscious? Does broccoli scream when boiled in water? (See The Secret Life of Plants by Tomkins and Bird). Does a stone feel pain when crushed? In Poethical Wager, Retallack often mentions John Cage's decision not to try to imitate nature (to inhabit, to experience the experience of the “other”?) but to imitate “her manner of operation” (Retallack p 189). To dream along with nature. We can all dream. Bracket or no bracket. Logical or Irrational. Philip K. Dick asked “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Is everything intelligent? As Retallack explores through Bohr and Wittgenstein in “What is Experimental Poetry and Why Do We Need It?”, the question remains: are there “limits of understanding” or only limits of language? - Jim Lynch Jim, the question you leave us with here I can't definitively answer but I think it's helpful to have beliefs around such things, and my belief for what it's worth is that we humans are limited in understanding (and language) by our limited senses and point of view -- however, there is such a thing as enlightenment, as in the Buddha or as in Christ consciousness, where all limitations fall away -- but few of us can attain this state for extended periods, especially those of us who live in extremely obfuscating place/times.
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Post by jimlynch on Jan 21, 2023 0:29:13 GMT -5
Philosophical Investigations into “None Too Soon” 1a) Where is memory located, where is it stored in the body? Are memories remembered? Does a memory exist of what never happened? Is the mind full of memories? Mindful of them? Careful with them? Do memories blend? Do memories grow from seed? Is a memory without precedent a deja vu? Are you a memory of someone else? A memory of a memory? If time is a circle what is remembering who? Where do memories go? 1a-b) Memories are wasted on the young. Memories are wanting in the young. Memories age like a fine wine if not scattered like grapes before swine. 1b) Ah, but the young come from fine seed, good family, no famine of gathered sound-bites, no spilled seed here: there is no place like Om, a vibrating Oui, firm sound to stand on. Yes. Yesterday. Memory of Yesterday bent, fold after fold, or as Ezra Pound says, “Ply over ply” (Canto 4), layer of sounds upon sound made firm: is the world a memory made of syllables? What language family has the finest stock of syllables? 2) Don't be scarce with time, don't be scarred by time. Is memory a scar in time? Don't look down from the top of the scar. Shear luck would have it in the hands of Pan. 3) The more something doesn't exist the more it persists. Would you count on it? No sure bet. Pascal's dilemma and the Poethical Wager. No choice. [see epigram to and pg 45 of “The Poethical Wager” essay] No will free? Pay your blues. Count your blessings. Don't count on them. How many memories are there all total? How many of them are mistakes? Do false memories count? Are false memories still memories? Are gods that don't exist more than others merely sounds not yet uttered? Thought-forms not yet thought? 4) I've never been known for sure to forget. Hard to remember what's always been unknown. Forget hardness, we want softness, pliancy. To have our way with memory. Easy to remember what's vague. It's the non-existent gods that are hardly remembered at all. Forge ahead. And don't forget the foregone conclusion (without precedent). Interlude) None, without, not yet, Don't, non-existent, never. Located, affirmation, counting, known, conjure, worthwhile, experiment, aware, construct, are. 5) Do memories exist in the muscles? According to Oscar Ichazo, memories of childhood trauma and fears can be stored in the muscles, and these feelings/memories/ tensions can be released by massage techniques. Wilhelm Reich had taught a similar theory of muscular armouring and the blockage of energy caused by repressed emotions, etc. Thoughts bound to occur. Thoughts bound to limited perspective. Prometheus bound to the rocks and Pandora's Box. Yearning to learn too much and exiled from Eden. Summon a thought, conjure a witness in a case without precedent. That gag order is hard to forget. Bring the teacher an apple. Bound and determined. Thoughts bound and thought flow. If the Lucretian swerve caused the first thought, the first choice, the first option between yes and no, was it an accident? Is choice determined? Are accidents free? Is every memory preordained after the fact open to speculation? No choice Jonah or Free Willy. Does that let loose a smile? 6) H.P. Lovecraft's “ short story “A Color out of Time” is about a meteorite from space that contains an alien color not known to man. His novella The Shadow out of Time is about an alien, extraterrestial race who can switch bodies and minds with other species. Why look for alien life anywhere else but in front of us. Mineral, rock, plants, vegetables. Can we know what it's like to be a stone, a blade of grass? Bergson's theory of Multiplicity: “a qualitative multiplicity consists in a temporal heterogeneity, in which “several conscious states are organized into a whole, permeate one another, [and] gradually gain a richer content” ( Time and Free Will, pp. 76-77)” [from the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]. Is this fantasy, can we ever “know” the “other”?? Are rocks and plants conscious? Does broccoli scream when boiled in water? (See The Secret Life of Plants by Tomkins and Bird). Does a stone feel pain when crushed? In Poethical Wager, Retallack often mentions John Cage's decision not to try to imitate nature (to inhabit, to experience the experience of the “other”?) but to imitate “her manner of operation” (Retallack p 189). To dream along with nature. We can all dream. Bracket or no bracket. Logical or Irrational. Philip K. Dick asked “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Is everything intelligent? As Retallack explores through Bohr and Wittgenstein in “What is Experimental Poetry and Why Do We Need It?”, the question remains: are there “limits of understanding” or only limits of language? - Jim Lynch Jim, the question you leave us with here I can't definitively answer but I think it's helpful to have beliefs around such things, and my belief for what it's worth is that we humans are limited in understanding (and language) by our limited senses and point of view -- however, there is such a thing as enlightenment, as in the Buddha or as in Christ consciousness, where all limitations fall away -- but few of us can attain this state for extended periods, especially those of us who live in extremely obfuscating place/times. I share the same view, Cat – and that our limitations fall away along with our isolated consciousness, our blinders fall away, our Emersonian blind spot – that we are in the way of ourselves – falls away. But then we are no longer who we are then, but part of something bigger. However, as long as we're stuck in our “human suits”, as I mentioned in my Final Thoughts, we can always understand better! And enlarge our perspectives, etc. Every nugget of knowledge is a fractal waiting to be revised and replicated into something greater, ad infinitum.
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Post by Judyagainandagain on Feb 1, 2023 10:37:08 GMT -5
The poet or author seems to be experimenting with what can be done in English in math associated space\time-oriented poetic writing of "pliant" is a word with denoted, moded and amoded phrases that seem of limited mimesis but maximal prospect through the object that is the word "pliant" to be flexible or to generate a flexible canonical oeuvre or but also (and I doubt this is there but it might be in Mimesis because he didn't cover it but could this poetic formal entity (the poem as a Poundian thing itself) of the poem "None too soon" count as a mode of prose mimesis that is also acceptable to whatever Plato and his people are of later generations or not of is something I ask of you Philosopher-Kings again because ) Plato and a later philosopher and again it arises which is a word I can't remember and is a word meaning abstract, denoted thing that doesn't exist more than anything (I think anyway because I have read limited only Plato of the Aesthetics limited class that shouldn't have been in 1992 at Temple University) that she is experimenting with the line between prose fiction and whatever poetry could be defined as and experimenting also with the parameters of poetic English and considering with a wry, humor attitude the English language's poetic prospects for other things too like mimesis suggesting that a word could mean or be a meaning multiple as one or two meanings each of I chose the word "pliant" which could tell a story generated by something like Barthes plaisir of the text or other philosopher's reader response theory of a
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