Not much to say about it except that it is inspired by one of the more famous of Wordsworth’s sonnets, which describes how the ocean, “with his eternal motion make(s)/ a sound like thunder–everlastingly.”

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I did think of a subject to discuss, and think I may be able to.  I still feel tired, but once I get started typing, I can usually keep going for a little while.  What I thought I’d like to discuss was whether or not I’m talented as a composer of non-representational visimages (visual artworks) like the one I posted yesterday.  I now think I may be because:

(1) I very probably have a very good and broad memory for visimagery which allows me to base my work on superior preceding work.

Background: a good portion of the aesthetic value of a non-representational visimage depends, I believe, in what it does with what has preceded it.  That’s because I consider a nonRep (let me call it, at least for now) to be a variation on one or more of all the visimages preceding it.  Every artwork causes its engagent to remember some other artwork, or group of artworks–almost always without “knowing” it (by which I mean that his analytical brain doesn’t break in and tell him what’s going on); the new work is compared to the remembered work or works.  If the new and old coincide too completely, the engagent will be bored; if they coincide too little, the result will be painful confusion.  The idea is for it to be just enough unfamiliar.  That I’ve held for 45 years is the entire basis of aesthetic pleasure.  I’ve seen nothing to contradict my belief, although no one yet has agreed with me about it.  Mostly, I think, for fear of recognizing oneself as a machine.

(2) I’m sure I’m more sensitive to the boringly familiar than most people, too.  In any case, I usually make a fair number of changes in the visimages I make, constantly recognizing the too-familiar.

(3)  Similarly, I seem also to be innately quicker to perceive the absence of unifying principles than others, and a unifying principle, more than anything else, prevents a work from becoming excessively unfamiliar.  Hence, in nonReps, I automatically repeat shapes and colors all over the place, as well as try to find and sustain some suggestion of an over-riding image–like a landscape with a moon in it.

(4) Keeping the images’ elements in some kind of balance–putting a splash of red to the left if there’s one to the right, for instance–is another thing I do automatically.

(5) Trying for interesting contrasts, is important to me, too–jagged lines versus smooth lines, for instance.

(6) Often but not always I try for as many different kinds of shapes and colors as I can handle.

(7) I don’t think I have a better-than-average sense of color, but I do have some notion as to what colors go well with others.

I don’t think about all this much when at work–they’ve become second nature; but after leaving a piece and coming back to it, I often do.

Okay, call these “Rough Notes of My Practice as a Visimagist.”  And let me go back to bed.

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 Diary Entry

Thursday, 22 December 2011, 4 P.M.  Another tennis morning–practice, not a league match.  I dropped some items off at the Arts & Humanities Council office, then did a little marketing.  After getting home I haven’t done much but escape read.  Just now, though, I’ve read over what I’d previously written about Jake Berry’s essay on the Otherstream.  It’s not bad but disorganized, so I printed out a copy to try to work out something that seems logically arranged from.  (Hard to do that on the computer, for me.)

8 P.M.   I’m getting very few Christmas cards this year, which does not make me unhappy, but one I like very much to get, the one from Eleanor Nichol and her daughter Sarah, arrived today.  I just used it to take care of this entry.

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And all three of my frames of “Triptych for Tom Phillips”:

About the ampersand, I commented something about how it expressed the essence of “andness.”  I loved the way its bird regurgitated what looked like all of itself, while looking to continue “anding” forever.  I said little about my full triptych except that if you click on them, you’ll see a larger image of them which may be helpful although still very small–and in black&white.  The original frames are each eleven by seventeen.  Oh, one thing I did point out was that the frames are about, “departure,” “journey” and “arrival,” and are intended to be about them in the largest sense, but particularly about them with regard to arriving–for either an engagent of it or its author.

* * *

Sunday, 4 October 2011.  Sunday is hazy to me now, three days in the past as it is.  I played tennis early in the morning–badly.  I didn’t return to my Shakespeare book, but evidentally got a blog entry posted, and probably wrote an exhibition hand-out or two.

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I’m pretty tired, this time for the legitimate reason that I only slept a half-an-hour last night.  I didn’t feel particularly edgy, for I wasn’t anxious about the procedure.  Maybe my body was.  Stress affects it much more than it affects the part of my brain the brain calls “me.”   As is often the case when I have insomnia, I had quite a few ideas.  One of them was a refinement of my long-held belief that it’s unfair to hold an innovative poem to the same standards of clarity a conventional poem is held to since the former is likely only clear because one reading it has been educated in the reading of such poems since nursery school or earlier, and has (probably) not been exposed to anything like what he needs to have been to find an innovative poem clear. 

 The refinement is a new term: “the clarity-to-exposure ratio.”  Or how clear a poem is to an engagent on a scale of, say, one to a hundred, and how much exposure he’s had to poems of its kind on the same scale.  Hence, a poem by Frost may have a clarity rating of 95, but an exposure rating of 95, as well, because of what school teachers have taught him about formal verse, and his memory of nursery rhymes, and much else.  One of my mathemaku may have a clarity rating of 8 (because it will have understandable words and recognizable mathematical symbols and, perhaps, recognizable graphic images).  It may have the same c-to-e ratio as the Frost poem, though, if its exposure rating is only 8,which it could well be because no such poems will have been taught to its engagent. 

Offhand, I would say a poem approaches ideal clarity to the degree its clarity-to-exposure ratio approaches point nine.  After its exposure rating has reached 100.  I make point nine (or some such figure)  the ideal because perfect clarity is boring.  That I consider a fact of aesthetics, not an opinion.

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This is another one that, so far, I like a lot.  I even think it should be popular!  In any event, there’s a lot more work I have to do–color the writing (I’m pretty sure) and work out background.  The latter will be a combination, I think, of what I did with my preceding poem, and what I’ve done with my other two cursive mathemaku.  I’m looking forward to playing with it, but also fearing to. 

Although many of my coinages sound pretentious, I always aim for ordinariness.  It’s not that easy to achieve.  Hence, “xenological poetry” as one of my main categories of poetry.  Well, I suddenly saw yesterday that “dislocational poetry” could takes its place.  Ironically, that was the very first name I gave such poetry–surrealistic and jump-cut poetry–thirty or forty years ago.  I don’t know why I dropped it.  I see no reason not to use it now, though, so will.

Meanwhile, I also realized that “vaudevillic” as a term for all varieties of jump-cut poems is unfair since some of them cohere quite nicely.  So I’m bringing back “jump-cut” to its previous position, and demoting “vaudevillic” to a secondary position as an adjective describing one kind of jump-cut poems, the other kind being, “convergent jump-cut poems.”  Be sure to update your copies of A Preliminary Taxonomy of Poetry,” students.

I’ve made a change in what constitutes aesthetic pleasure, too: one of two things, fundaesthetic pleasure or pleasure due to fundaceptual stimuli, and anthraesthetic pleasure, or pleasure due to anthroceptual stimuli.  Then there’s a sort of new word, “osmoticism,” for the ability to learn osmotically, and its antonym, “unosmoticism,” which I use to represent one of the many intellectual dysfunctions of people who don’t believe in Shakespeare.

Last, and close to least is, “lifage,” my word for anything a person uses to trade when attempting to  increase the pleasure-to-pain ratio of his life.  An economics term.  There are two kinds of lifage, “inborn” and “acquired,” the latter of which is a person’s private property.  I came up with it because I needed some such term for what one trades to another when one rents a house to the latter in return for (the lifage) of money.  It’s not the lifage of the house (assuming for the sake of argument that it is as good after the rental period as it was before it) but the actual hours of life the landlord gives up, hours he could have used enjoying the house himself and which are permanently lost.  In other words, the term, “unearned income,” is nonsense.

“If you can’t define something, either you are lacking in analytical ability or it doesn’t exist.”  Bob Grumman.

By “define” I mean describing something not perfectly but intelligently enough for others to use your definition to find and use what you’ve defined.  For instance: to say that Bob Grumman’s residence is “the house with green walls at the southeast corner of Midway Boulevard and Hayworth Road in Port Charlotte, Florida, USA,” is to define it more than sufficiently for most purposes.  Ways can be found, in my view, for you to define it (or anything else) in any greater details required for whatever your purpose is.  Eventually.  To not yet have sufficient data to define something well does not make it undefinable.

I’m writing all this because of another stupid passage in Nordlinger’s New Criterion music review: “. . . a Carnegie Hall booklet featured an interview with James Taylor, the folk-rock-pop legend.  He said, ‘A trick that I seem to have used over and over again is to juxtapose a cheerful musical style with a grave or heavy lyrical content.  These things are so beyond description and analysis.’”  Sure, for someone not blessed with a good reducticeptual awareness (and most people in the arts are not, although Taylor seems to me to have given a helpful, partial description of his art).   I don’t fault Taylor for his off-hand remark about description and analysis, but Nordlinger for using it to support his belief in things that are beyond analysis, in this case a piece of unconventional music Nordlinger quoted a terrible attempt at an analysis of–in his mind to show, I gather, the futility of analysis, not that analysis, like anything else, can be poorly done.

Only initial premises are beyond analysis, and they are very few, one of mine being “The Universe is an eternal collection of matter and at least one urwareness occupying infinite space.”  (An “urwareness” is a person’s final eternal conscious-of-existence self; I know I have one and have no way of knowing whether anyone else does or not.)  My final definition of matter, if I had one, would be my only other unanalyzable premise, I believe.  My definition of space is simply “everywhere that matter isn’t.”  I recognize that this definition is considered obsolete by certified scientists, but hold to it, anyway.  Indeed, I recognize that I’m not saying anything certain philosophers now considered hopelessly out of it weren’t saying 200 or more years ago.

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