POETICKS

1. That anything whatever is undefinable.

2. That anything other than consciousness is immaterial.

3. That the consciousness is material.

4. That only poetry that is effective is “genuine” poetry.

5. That beauty is a matter of taste. (See hatred #1.)

6. That liberty is only an important value so long as it does not become license.

7. Pure democracy, or the belief that 100,000,000 votes by 100,000,000 stupid people should count more than 99,999,999 votes by intelligent people.

8. That anyone should have the right to tell me how to live my life so long as I don’t physically injure another’s private property (i.e., all he owns, including his body) against his will without cause (as I’d have if I were protecting myself or someone else from the other’s attempt to physically harm another’s private property).

9. That I’m not important. (Note: whether I hate an idea or not does not depend on whether the idea is true or not.)

10. That formal education is essential to a person’s full intellectual development.

11. That one should hold a person’s ideas, as opposed to his actions, against him, since ideas really aren’t very important.

I suppose I could think of another hundred, but I don’t want to alienate everyone who reads my list–just 90%. I’ve been feeling very mean lately, I’m not sure why.

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Definition: a group of words that provides a person with sufficient objective means to distinguish a given item from everything else in the universe near-perfectly (but not perfectly, which would be impossible).

Comments.  The refusal of morons to accept a given definition does not make it invalid, even if the morons make up a majority of the people using the language of the definition.  What counts is simply whether an intelligent person can use it to get to what it defines wherever it is, in space, the world of ideas, or anywhere else.  Everything can be defined once enough is known about it; that this may take time and can be extremely difficult, is irrelevant. 

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I prefer not to mention politics here because I’m one-half an outrageously extreme right-winger, and one half an outrageously extreme left-winger.  In other words, I believe in maximal freedom, both the economic freedom that left-wingers hate and the moral freedom that right-wingers hate, so highly likely to arouse dislike in people I want to be friends with.  However, like everyone who reads the papers or watches news programs on television, I’m getting saturated with the views of the Republicans fighting it out for the presidential nomination, and commentators’ analysis thereof, and finally can’t keep from responding to one idiocy that particularly annoys me, the right-wing belief that we need to continue increasing our population because our gross domestic product will shrink if we don’t.  My thoughts, not yet well-organized or complete:

(1) I don’t care about the gross domestic product; I care about the gross cultural product.  Here’s an example showing what I mean by this: Smith writes a bad novel that sells ten million copies in 2011, which adds $20,000,000 to the gdp, but only 20 cultural units to the gcp, because it only gives a tiny measure of short-term pleasure to its readers while taking shelf space in bookstores away from much better books, which has a negative effect on the gcp; meanwhile, Jones composes 10 mathemaku that I post on the Internet, that only 100 people find enjoyable, but 20 of them get a relatively large measure of long-term pleasure from, which includes the pleasure they get from composing poems inspired by Jones’s, so the ten mathemaku add 1000 cultural units to 2011′s gcp.  Note, a cultural unit is worth $1,000,000 to the intelligent few, but nothing to the unintelligent many–until many years later when the work the latter enjoy is finally exploiting the innovations in works like mathemaku.

(2) Increased population will probably increase the number of valuable culturateurs (the Joneses), but–as I will show–will probably severely reduce their effectiveness.

(3) A sane goal for any country would be to reduce the number of workers needed to provide the country’s population with a happy, meaningful life.  Our country is unconsciously doing this via automation, and the fewer workers we have available, the more it will do this, because it has to. 

(4) Negative population growth will give us more wilderness, which is an unacknowledged need of human beings, particularly superior human beings.  Places to get away from others, which are as necessary as places to get together with others.  Places to get away from human products, too.  Places to enlargingly be with other species, too.

(5) Increased wilderness and fewer people will make pollution more difficult–for example, there will be fewer cars emitting poison gases into the sky.

(6) Increased wilderness will be a boon for wildlife; it will mean less highways for raccoons to get killed on, for one thing.  It will make it less likely that dangerous creatures will invade areas inhabited by human beings, too.

(7) Decreased populations will make wars for land less likely.

(8) Decreased populations will decrease the over-stimulation I consider a major problem for Westerners at this time.  Most of us have many too many others to relate to, and many too many ideas to try to understand.  Why, I wonder, must we continue to advance culturally a hundred times faster than we did a thousand years ago?

(9) I may be about the only one in the world for whom this is a problem, but I do not like thinking of myself as one human being in a population of seven billion.  How can I possibly think whether I live or die is meaningful when there are 6,999,999,999 others who will carry on after I die?  Even if I’m among the top hundred innovators of my time, it’s pretty clear that someone else would have done what I’ve done had I not existed, if maybe a year or two later than I.

(10) I wonder if cultural progress has reached or will soon reach a time of too many cooks spoiling the broth.

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I’ve been idly pursuing an Internet search on my name, not to check up on my reputation (although I’ve certainly done that in the past), just hunting places I have poems at so I can list them in the page I have here at my blog for links to my poetry.  What amazes me is how much there is about me.  One would think I was important.  But in spite of all the comments on me and references to my work, I have not had a request for any of my collections of poetry in years.  I did recently get an order for my Of Manywhere-at-Once from someone I’ve exchanged e.mails with at New-Poetry.  Haven’t heard back about the book.  I rarely hear anything about my work, not even my reviews and columns for Small Press Review.  It’s confusing: the Internet tells me I’m not invisible, but my personal experience indicates it would be hard for me to be less visible. 

During my travels on the net, I’ve been annoyed a few times.  Once by some expert on haiku who said my claim in my “Divergery” essay for Modern Haiku that not all classical haiku were 5/7/5 was wrong, but didn’t say why.  I would love to know as it’s quite possible I am wrong.  If so, I want to correct my error.  It’s not too important to me, because I don’t consider myself an authority on Japanese haiku, only on American haiku, which is something else, and absolutely is no longer 5/7/5, thank goodness.

Eventually, I found a 2004 blog entry by a guy who had read and was positive about an old essay of mine I had at my Comprepoetica site.  It was from the nineties: “Note toward a Tasxonomy of Literature.”  What he said about it made me track it down.  It still makes sense to me but I’ve changed my terminology a lot since I wrote it, and simplified portions of the taxonomy.  Nonetheless, I thought it worth posting here, which I did.  Notes, it certainly is.  Good ones.

I found another essay in the same place, “Toward a Complete Taxonomy of Visio-Text Art.”  Another good one although the terminology, again, is out of date.  It’s now stored among the “Pages” here.

Diary Entry

Thursday, 29 December 2011, 5 P.M.  I described most of my day in yesterday’s blog entry.  A sizable expenditure of energy that didn’t result in much–but I did finally put the new version of my “Mathemaku for Scott Helmes” together and get it properly framed.  I argued some more at Spidertangle, but the discussion seems to me to be going too loopy to be worth recording here at my blog–except for some good posts by Joel Lipman. 

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WhenI was in my teens and early twenties, I thought fifty years should be more than enough time for me to do all I wanted to do in life.  Of course, I also thought my brilliance would be recognized long before I turned thirty, and I could have all the creature comforts I wanted for the rest of my life from what the plays I then was writing would earn.  Iover-estimated the swiftness with which I would master the arts I thought I had already just about mastered.  I more gravely under-estimated the power of the mediocrities to block cultural advances of consequence.   My one other failing was broadness of interests.  Because of that, when I didn’t succeed socio-economically in one field as quickly as I wanted to, I jump into another field.  I now believe that I showed enough potential in every field I entered to have been subsidized by the relevant establishment . . . had any establishment been interested in furthering talent rather than protecting mediocrity. 

In any event, I was almost as nowhere in the bigWorld when I turned fifty as I had been thirty years before.  But I had managed to master visual poetry, theoretical psychology and literary criticism–as far as I was concerned.  I figured then that I would need another twenty years.  Ten to finish up the major life-works I had under way, and ten to enjoy feeling good about them, and occasionally pontificating about them.  Those extra twenty years have passed.  Now I just want ten, to finish at least one of my major life-works.  I don’t think any more than that would be helpful, for I don’t think I’d any longer have the energy required for any serious work.

On the other hand, if it were possible to live to the age of 500 in reasonable health years, I’d agree to do it.  That’s something I never would have at the age of twenty.  I would have thought it would mean 450 years of boredom.  But now, oh, to have the time to master mathematics and physics–and learn ten or twenty languages to use as a basis of a complete knowledge of linguistics.  And fifty years to write the series of novels I believe I could.  Then make them into movies.  And read all the comic books I missed when I was young!  Not to mention the musical instruments, particularly the piano, that I could learn.  All kinds of musical compostions would surely follow. 

Now I’m getting annoyed.  What kind of evolution is it that could put 500 years of grand accomplishments into a person but give him only 70 or 80 years to carry them out?  Okay, no doubt I’m exaggerating what I could do with extra years, but I can’t believe that I couldn’t accomplish twice as much as I have with just fifty more healthy years.  I mean meaningful accomplishments, too–not just two hundred mathemaku instead of a hundred, but new works as interesting as the mathemaku but entirely different.  Change from Yeats to Beethoven, say.

One thing that would never happen: my getting the ability to type without constantly typing things like tihs.

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Tuesday, 13 December 2011, 6 P.M.  Tennis in the morning, a meeting of the Tuesday Writers’ Group in the afternoon, and I’m beat.  I didn’t think I’d get anything done but remembered a file of poems I’d gotten yesterday rom Karl Kempton with lots of good specimens among them,  so used two of them, along with a brief comment, as my entry for the day.   I fear I won’t do anything more today.   Wait, I just realized I can actually do something very easy that will keep my streak of doing something concerning my upcoming exhibition every day.   * * *  I’ve just done it.  My friend Jerry found a couple of small mistakes in one of my hand-outs for the exhibition which I’ve just corrected.

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Old thoughts about ambition in general, and my own ambitions in particular, have been jittering through spaces in my brain lately.  The old thoughts  jinked enough slightly new thoughts free for me to continue considering the topic here.

Old thought: that I’ve seemed unambitious to many because I haven’t pushed for power, conventional status or money when in fact I’ve been almost insanely ambitious, for my True Main Goal in Life for around 45 years has been to be the World’s First Double World-Genius, or a tick superior to Goethe. I felt I had a chance to accomplish this by becoming a great poet and do for psychology what Newton did for physics and Darwin for Biology.  I may have done both but there doesn’t seem yet to be much evidence for the greatness in poetry, or any for the other.  I should be a shoo-in for the title of the World’s Most Ambitious Failure, though. 

Ambition is just another name for a desire–instinctive, I’m convinced–to have made an important contribution to the tribe.  Its size depends to a large degree on the strength of one’s sagaceptual awareness.  That’s what determines the saga one chooses to be the hero of in one’s lifetime.  Here’s a truly embarrassing disclosure: what I really would have liked to do was (1) gain an absolutely full understanding of not just the human mind but of the entire universe . . . and (2) carry out what Wagner tried for–more fully.  I didn’t think the first would have been all that hard, being merely to do a somewhat better job than I have figuring out how the brain works, and establishing a model of a single particle such that its interactions with other particles like it, but not quite exactly like it, would account for everything we know about the universe.  No big deal.

As for the Ultimate Artwork, computers will soon make it possible.  (A sub-ambition of mine was to have contributed enough ideas to computer technology for computers to what I’m going to speak of possible right  now.  Yes, basically my ambition was to achieve godhood–which is probably why the actual god has treated me to badly, even though he was the one who wired my ambitions into me.)  The Ultimate Artwork would be a virtual reality world inside a computer an engagent would connect his nervous system to and experience as a more or less passive spectator sitting on a chair in the middle of the artwork.  The work would present stimuli for all of his senses, all of them fully operative.

There would be many kinds of ultimate artworks.  The one that most appeals to me would be the equivalent of a three-hour play.  Settings would move.  Some scenes would be in prose, some in verse; some would have musical accompaniment the way many movies do; some would be sung; some would be fantasy, some naturalistic; stream of conscious thinking might occur; simple texts for the spectator to read might be part of the mix, too, and I like the idea of intermission during which a spectator could retire to a virtual library to read a virtual reality reference book pertinent to the artwork underway.  What really appeals to me is the story of some hero, with a link at some appropriate place in his story to a second work concerning his past, or events of centuries ago, leading to this, or–best of all–an archaeological dig whose discoveries experts discuss and show to be relevant to the event of the main story.  There could be links to many stories about some or all of the other characters in the first story.  In short, the work would be a whole world, or universe–but rendered much happier than the one we seem now actually to be in.  Why scorn wish-fulfillment?  Wh bless wish-denial as for some reason superior to it?

Diary Entry for 15 November 2011, 1 P.M.: I played tennis this morning–very badly.  I don’t feel I’m moving very well.  I feel a little sluggish but not as much as usually do.  Not enough to put me into the Null Zone, or even reduce my (cultural) productivity badly.  Before and after tennis, I took care of my A&H Exhibition chore for the day.  I also got this blog entry done.  I may have posted one or two good Shakespeare authorship comments, too, and those I now consider important.  I will soon be commenting at the Scientific American site, having subscribed to the magazine to be allowed to comment.  I hope to get people discussing my psychological theories, which could be very helpful.  Or a killer.

I haven’t yet done anything on my Shakespeare book.  It’s unlikely that I will until five o’clock or later as I have a meeting of the Tuesday Writers Group to go to in an hour or so.

9 P.M.:  When I got home from the meeting, I was too worn out to do much on my book.  I quickly typed a short paragraph just so I could feel I’d done something on it today.  The paragraph was conceptually first-rate, though–although not well-written.

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I’ve just read a rather silly essay about American social mobility.  Its author is a standard economist who seems pretty much solely concerned with crap like income, and “standard of living,” instead of the only thing of consequence, “lifetime satisfaction.”  He dithered a good deal about how present Americans are doing compared with their parents, his standard of measurement being where each subject is on the continuum of yearly income.  It seems to me that America has during my lifetime gone beyond where income matters.  Or should matter, since of course it matters to the idiots who rate their lives by how many people they make more money than rather than how much they are able to enjoy life were they not idiots.   Nonetheless, how my own family has made out in these terms is interesting to me.  My grandparents were fairly high on the socio-economic scale, one grandfather a New York City doctor, the other a corporation vice president (of Merganthaler).  Each seems to have reached the highest socio-economical level of anyone in my lineage that I know about.  It’s included a number of doctors, lawyers, preachers, dentists and farmers, so of whom did well, I imagine, but no real notables (except for the distant cousins that I suppose every family has, my favorite two being LeRoy Grumman, founder of Grumman Aircraft, and William Tecumsah Sherman, Sherman having been my mother’s maiden name). 

My parents plunged, partly because of the depression, and partly because my father had unlucky genes.  I think he was in one of the wrong orbits for any kind of success–too bright for average success and not bright enough for superior success.   Or maybe even, like I, he had too confusingly many talents for the focus needed.  Unlike me, though, he was unable entirely to ignore the normal world and try to force his way to greatness, anyway.  Which is to say, he opted for standard jobs and a family.  I also did a few terms in normal jobs but never took on the responsibilities of a family.  He also had an Irish drinking problem that I don’t, unless you count my on&off addiction to Mountain Dew.  And pain pills.  In spite of all this, he kept the family near the middle of the continuum, and his and my mother’s last twenty years were quite comfortable.  One of my brothers did about the same, even to the extent of raising four kids, like my parents did.  My other brother and my sister rose back to where most or our ancestors seems to have been although neither has gotten quite as high, I don’t think, as our grandparents.  (My mother, born in 1904, grew up with servants–black ones–can you imagine?)  As for me, I’ve spent my adult life in the bottom ten percent.  That’s why I say income is meaningless.

This is an old story I may be repeating for the tenth or twentieth time.  I think what I, below the poverty line, have, and I really can’t see that one of my very best friends, who is in the top one percent, is better off than I, though I’d love to be financially able to do some of things he does, like go to Europe or Japan every year or so.  I would say that the only thing truly wrong with my life is my lack of recognition as either a poet or a theoretical psychologist.  But that’s my own fault–lack of pushiness and laziness.  Lack of focus much of the time, too.  Too little methodicalness!   I also wish I’d had money enough to get the kind of computer set-up I have now sooner (and even, I have to admit, enough to have an even better computer set-up than I have now).

Its my inferior but more than reasonably sufficient computer set-up that I credit with what I consider my high standard of happiness (however much I complain).  The computer games alone are more and better than any I dreamed of having as a child, although I only bother with a few.  And for not much more than I used to pay to see a movie in a theatre, I can get a DVD of a movie (with incredible color and special effects) I can watch at home in comfort–when I feel like it (and pause and do other nice things with).  And there are are so many new movies that are reasonably entertaining plus just about all the old ones–and old and new television episodes.  The best things about the computer, though, are the size of the library I can do research on just about everything, my ability to break into at least some contact with the big world with comments at other blogs and my own blog entries, and–best of all–an ability to do more than I’m capable of as a graphic artist, while also being able to publish books, both e.books and regular ones, although I have to take care of binding the latter off the computer.

Key point: that my ability to exploit the computer depends almost entirely on my intelligence and creativity, not on my social status or financial standing.  I am easily capable of enjoying the computer as much as anyone else on earth is, it seems to me.

What else do I have, in spite of my impoverishment?   Well, there are two tennis courts less than a quarter of a mile from my house that so few others use that I can play on them almost any time I wanted to, so I am, in effect, the owner of a tennis club.  I can shoot baskets at a nearby middle school, too.  I own my house outright.  I got it from my parents, but sank quite a bit of my own money in it before that, so I feel I bought it with my own money, and my ten years taking care of my mother, an invalid during her final twelve years.  (My brothers and sisters thought so, too, which is why they turned over their shares to me after my mother died.) 

I have several bicycles, but no car.  I do have serious credit card debts due mainly to my investment in my Runaway Spoon Press, originally for a Xerox, but also for a lot of paper, ink, and my computers.  My food is free because I’m on medicaide.  Health care nearly free.  Dental care, though, is killing me.  But rich people have similar problems–basically, things always have to be taken care of by the rich as well as the poor.  Among the old-fashioned riches I enjoy are my many books.  And artworks I’ve gotten as gifts from artists I remain convinced will one day be famous (but whose works thrill me, regardless of how the world feels or will feel about them).  How do you compare the level of living of  a poor person with the ability to appreciate the best art with a rich person without that ability–even though he owns a hundred masterpieces?  I think I get more out of an issue of ARTnews than most of the rich people who own the originals of the works I see in that magazine.  I have access to public libraries, too, however little I need them in this age of computers.

Income would only be of consequence if no one had too little income to live on or wasn’t paid for his inability to earn a living in food and other necessities by the state.    I claim that only a very few are both–the extraordinary incompent or unlucky that every conceivable soceity will inevitably have.  The only real problem is with those who want more, no matter what they have.  True, I want more.  The problem actually is with those who want more no matter what they have and believe others have an obligation to give it to them.  I don’t believe others have an obligation to give me more than I’ve gotten so far, only that it’d be nice if they could only realize the value of my contributions to society and reward me appropriately.

Diary Entry, 14 November 2011, 8 P.M.: Yesterday ended well, with a little more of the Shakespeare chapter I’m working on taken care of.  Today wasn’t too great but I got this entry done, and the illustrations, at least, for my first exhibition hand-out.  I also did a little more on the Shakespeare book, and thought through whatneeds doing on the next section I’ll be tackling.  My subject is the socioplex, which I consider one’s over-all semi-automatic understanding of oneself and others.  My main need is to find a good order for my description of it. which I think I have: a general description of it; the history of my thinking about it (which will help further describe it); a description of its two “personae,” “the Urceptual Self” and “the Urceptual Other”; a list of the more important other personae in it; a description of the “tags” that allow the self and other to pass themselvesoff as the various other personae; details of the personae most important in the make-up of the conspiraplex that a rigidnik’s socioplex will become part of.  I think that’s it One of my hardest problems is keeping what I discuss to a minimum.  I must not give in to my natural desire to say everything I can about the Anthroceptual Awareness, which is the part of the mind the socoioplex is the main but not only occupant of. 

 
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I wrote the following mini-essay for New-Poetry on Tuesday: 

Back on this past Sunday I got to musing about the paucity of real ideas in my boilerplate–and how few I have anywhere.  And I repeat them incessantly, yes.  But isn’t that true of everyone?  How many basic ideas can one have about, say, poetry?  A choice between making it new and sticking to the tried and trew; the most important element in poetry is X, with maybe ten different possible X’s; poetry is Y, with maybe ten different possible definitions; a choice between poetry created by intuition and poetry created by reasoning; poetry should be about subject Z, with maybe ten or fifteen possible general Z’s; a poem’s tone ought to be W, with a few different possible W’s; a choice between poems that make you work to appreciate and poems that don’t . . .  No doubt a few more, but no more than a dozen or so, I would think.  Each individual would have his own package of ideas and make from them a near-infinite set of variations by expressing them in different combinations and words, but rarely saying anything truly new in his life time.  Like certain song birds I’ve heard of that apparently invent a number of songs, then repeat them for the rest of their lives.

I definitely believe all the important ideas I have had in my life are few and none genuinely original, although I’ve turned a lot of them into novel arrangements, and found my own idiosyncratic way to express them.  I don’t think others have done more.  I’m curious how others feel about this. I do know what it’s like to feel like your teeming with ideas, but I feel that in the final analysis you would find all of them minor variations on very few basic ideas.  What I’ve been saying here, for instance, can be reduced to the basic idea that understandings of existence can be reduced to a few ultimate major facts the way physicists have reduced it to various sub-atomic particles, an outlook many, of a different temperament than I (including most participants and lurkers at New-Poetry), would disagree, neither side being right since (I believe) no basic idea can be proved or disproved.  Which is another basic . . . ideational dichotomy.

 

Okay, I shouldn’t bother New-Poetry with this, but confine it to my blog, but what the heck, maybe there are fans of aimless cocktail-party-level philosophizing here—and what I’ve said is not entirely off-topic.

I wouldn’t call the polarity below nihilism, but it does illustrate the fallacy of bifurcation quite nicely.

 

In between the extremes of “making it new” and “tried and true” is a vast and shifting, even shifty territory, seems to me.  As Robert Frost put it, all the fun’s in how you say a thing. 

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