[Newspoetry] Re: Newspoetry Digest, Vol 2, Issue 1
emerick at chorus.net
emerick at chorus.net
Wed Apr 7 12:46:04 CDT 2004
Well, Kurtz takes my words at a different pitch -- because form is how
we necessarily style words, into packets that have some character to
them. The learned social preferences of poets, as a community of
style, is quite different than those of the learned social preferences
of scientists. It well might be that each community differentially
evolves, against the context of those existing preferences, internal to
one community, and, structurally (ie as form), external to any others --
including and excluding being concurrent kinds of processes.
My different pitch, I had hoped to say, is that all such choice of
forms, ab initio, are free -- or arbitrary. One can not tell what is
true by looking at a form, to see how its matters of content appear to
us. Form does not disclose what is true. What is true, as a matter of
logic, for instance, follows from suppositions about consistency: one
can not reasonably agree to include, in the confines of a single
logical form, both a proposition and its negation.
My pitch extends its difference, on the premise that form serves some
uses, to science versus literature. Most critically, science never
accepts the idea that its suppositions are true, because of the way
that they may happen to be stated, (with)in some form. Rather, science
insists on the external verifiability principle -- that what is
external to a writing necessarily furnishes us with the criteria for
deciding what is a true statement. Consistency in science becomes that
set of statements that one could not plausibly reject, on the basis of
stating what one knows to be true, of the world. Consequences, in
science, have to be tested -- to see if they occur.
None of this happens, though, in literature (classically speaking).
One can not say, of Odysseus, the figure, that it matters whether he
"existed" as such, and, then, only as so described. The generality
that is possible in all writing has no natural limits.
Science chose its limits, in the very idea of understanding what is
natural, as a sequence, explicable in terms of previous states of that
same sequence. Poetry chooses, as well, in contrast, to appreciate the
natural -- in a way which aims more at human attachments (obsesssions,
in the extreme) -- by exposing to us what could be the state of our
expectations, as possibly against the way that things may merely happen
to be.
Science writing, thus, really finds it unnecessary to exclaim "Aha!"
even though every learner, in acquiring the preferences of his
community, most likely constantly exclaims -- or else fails as a
scientist. By contrast, what Poetry may evoke is more of a soothing
sound like "Aaahhh..." -- of contentment, or discontentment (as in
"Aye, tear 'er tattered ensigns down, long 'ave they waved on
high..." When Poetry voices discontent, it implies or relies upon our
knowing or assuming what is a proper content.
So, form really cuts no distinction between writings. A scientific
tract would be as true, or not, regardless of its form. And, a Poem
would be as good or bad, a thing of beauty or not, by how we happen to
feel. When we change, and we can, a Poem may thus become reviled and
despised, or resurrected and revived. But, science does not depend on
the states of affairs in individuals, as to how they personally may
regard their own attachments. Unlike Poetry, Science only has a
collective existence, as what would necessarily be common to all men.
Well, that's my pitch of philosophy (to steal from Cavell).
Don**2
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