Chasing ... Cutting

[Terrance Flaherty]

Mark Wright AIA wrote:
> Repeat after me:
> both/and, both/and, both/and...



I would, but here with  but a text I sit alone, 
and like the soul to Yeat's self my tongues a stone. 

Besides I would only repeat after me and contradict myself
again.  



The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book, 
Except that the reader leaned over the page. 

AND 

Poetry is the subject of the poem,
>From this the poem issues and

To this returns. Between the two,
Between issue and return, there is

An absence in reality,
Things as they are. Or so we say.

But are these separate? Is it
An absence for the poem, which acquires

Its true appearance there, sun's green
Cloud's red, earth feeling, sky that thinks?

>From these it takes. Perhaps it gives, 
In the universal intercourse. 

		---Wallace Stevens

Remember JAMF's formula is S I N. 

Ever refer to a person as the "NaCl of the earth"?


E = mc2
What was our trust, we trust not;
What was our faith, we doubt;
Whether we must or must not, we must debate about.

The soul, perhaps, is a gust of gas
And wrong is a form of right--
But we know that Energy equals Mass
By the Square of the Speed of Light.

What we have known, we know not;
What we have proved, abjure;
Life is a tangled bow knot, 
But one thing still is sure.
Come, little lad; come little lass--

Your docile creed recite:
"we know that Energy equals Mass
By the Square of the Speed of Light. 

'Twas brillig, and the slivy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves, 
And the mome raths outgrabe. 

TRP writes quest stories, the quest for the "meaning" of the
poems above or of any text, involves a balance of openness
and constraint. The text is not simply black marks on paper
until a reader gives it his/her meaning. Kai gave a
wonderful example today--Kazoo--of why in the interest if of
nothing else, of communication itself, the cumulative
sharing of culture justifies the concern for accurate
replication of the texts as they were conceived by their
authors. The problem of eliciting meaning from texts and
propaganda analysis both in Nazi-dominated media and the
U.S. dominated media is significant concern of TRP's work.
However, post war, post-Sputnik intellectualism fostered the
extraordinary dominance of the New Critics both in
Universities and Critical circles. TRP's response is a
balanced response, his novels and essays show remarkable
balance. He does not get caught, as his critics do, it being
their business not his, in the pendulum swing
disillusionment with the New-Critics that attempted to give
the reader 
his/her freedom by killing the author. Sure, both/and, but
Moby-Dick is not a tale told by idiot about a little girl
that feel down a rabbits hole with her cousin Hamlet.