Archive for the ‘Old Age’ Category
Entry 1220 — Old Age, Part 3
Saturday, September 21st, 2013
Now to my thesis that we oldsters can no long fit knowleplexes larger than a certain not-very-large size into our brains—because of the size and complexity of the structures we’ve already erected in them. I have a simple analogy to explain it: one’s understanding of existence as a little city in the cerebrum that one’s brain has spent its lifetime building. Everything in it is basically as permanent as city buildings; repairs are made, unmendable damage occurs, but basically, little changes. Eventually, there is no longer any place to erect anything new of significant size. I suppose one could demolish some old building to make room, but I think that would be more difficult than destroying a city building is.
At some point, one starts to have trouble figuring out where to put new data. A consideration is keeping track of important old understandings. Result: a more and more great disinclination to read anything with new data in it.
I’ve scratched the surface of my ideas on this–without sating them too carefully. Old age making me too tired to? Old age making it hard for me to find the words and ideas I need? Both?
One thing I particular delayed me: my wanting to use my terms for various kinds of data. I was sure I had tree terms, but could not remember the third, and find any list tat had it. The two that are, right now, second-nature enough for me not easily to forget (although I have always been able to forget just about anything) “knowlecule” or word-sized datum like “hoof” or “horse”; and “knowleplex” or complex specialty like zoology–the discipline, not the word for it. Both knowlecules and knowleplexes come in various sizes. In many cases, it’s not easy to say which a given datum is. Many, too, are both: the game of baseball, for instance, is a knowlecule for a doctor specializing in sports injuries; but a knowleplex for a baseball manager.
I’d been wondering about my third conage for several days. It finally occurred to me a little while ago (it’s a little after four as I write this, in case anyone cares–as a scholar in the next century plotting my creative cycles may): “knowlexpanse” or a significantly large field like biology. I think somewhere I coined a word for world-view, too, and lost it. Or maybe accepted “world-view” as good enough.
I’m stopping now–as I seldom would have with so little written forty, or even just twenty, years ago.
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Entry 1219 — Old Age, Part 2
Friday, September 20th, 2013
When I reached my intellectual prime is near-impossible to pin down, but my favorite guess—mainly, I suspect, because it’s a standardly Interesting Number, is the age of fifty. One thing that makes the choice near-impossible is how to compare one’s breakthrough understanding of his subject (or, in my case, one of them) with his later, very gradual efforts to make that understanding full, coherent, and—perhaps most important, and definitely most difficult—accessible to others.
I came up with the basis, still unchanged except superficially, of my knowlecular psychology at the age of 26 and don’t feel I’ve yet made it full, coherent and accessible, although I’ve had many breakthroughs that (in my view, valuably) expanded it, and continuously simplified and clarified it—while simultaneously, alas, complicating and muddying it.
My peak as a poet is much easier to identify, although I’m uncertain of the exact dates involved.1
My major breakthrough into long division poetry (after a minor breakthrough into mathematical poetry twenty years or so previous that I didn’t go anywhere with for fifteen years or more) happened when I was around fifty-five; my much less consequential breakthrough into my Poem poems occurred at about the same time. Two definite peaks that all that nothing that followed reached although I am sure some of the poems I later made were my best till then. I contend that making one’s best poem does not require more or even as much, intelligence, talent, or whatever, as making one’s first successful poem that is significantly and valuably different from all the other poems one has composed. In fact, coming up with a bad poem may require more skill than making a very good one if the bad one is new in a wonderfully exploitable way.2
In short, I think I peaked as a poet at the age of 55, then held my own pretty much until recently, when I’ve become substantially less productive than I’d been between 55 and 70. I don’t think the level of my poems has dropped, just the number of them. An interesting possibility is that I may still compose the visiopoetic epic I’ve wanted someday to. What kind of peak would it be? It would probably be my major work as a poet. I’m pretty sure it would include several poems I already consider major—for me. But the intelligence and/or related abilities I’d need to bring it off would not need to be at the high level they once were, or even all that close to it.
I realize that I’ve not done much work on my psychology since I turned 70 or 71, either. I want to pull it together into a unified whole the same way I hope to pull together my poetry into a unified epic. Again, it would not take what its discovery and later additions and improvements did.
I don’t know of any thinker or artist who did anything after turning 70 or so that greatly changed the over-all value of his work as a whole. Picasso, for instance, turning out hundreds of works, some of them as fine as anything he’d previously done, but meaning he’d made 654 masterpieces instead of only 611: so what? We don’t really need them, happy as we should be to have them. (For one thing, others are carrying on from where he left off—something true of all the other great artists, and thinkers who went on to do valuable work after 70.)
In every other way, people over 70 are nothing like they were at 35 or even 55. For most jobs, a businessman would be stupid to hire someone that old instead of a much younger person. Affirmative action will no doubt soon force him to. As a matter of fact, I think there have been several cases of elderly farts successfully suing businesses that fired them.
Odd, the idea I had that sparked this discussion I almost left the discussion without mentioning. It concerns the inability of elderly farts to acquire data significantly new to them. In simplest terms, it concerns how these people stop reading complex books. I was thinking of myself, of how it’s been, what, twenty years, since I read the equivalent of an undergraduate textbook on anything?! My thesis, which I hope to get to tomorrow, is that we oldsters can no long fit knowleplexes larger than a certain not-very-large size into our brains—because of the size and complexity of the structures we’ve already erected in them.
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1 I believe my diary has the particulars, or most of them, but I’m certainly not going to research it right now
2 As Gertrude Stein’s specimens of prose (evocature, a sub-category of prose, is what I call the kind of literature they are) in Tender Buttons have been for many, albeit not her (although I would call a few of them more successful than not).
Egalapsychosis: the insane belief that no one is inferior in any way to anyone else. A mental dysfunctionality common to American liberals.
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Entry 1218 — My Ageism
Thursday, September 19th, 2013
About the only good thing about being as old as I am is that it gives me a group to be politically incorrect about because I’m in it. The group, of course, is . . . senior citizens. I contend that anyone who thinks senior citizens are not inferior to those younger than they is out of his mind. I do believe that an elderly fart–someone over fifty-five (plus or minus anywhere from one to ten years)–should have one advantage over his juniors, including himself when younger: his experience. He will exploit it more slowly than he once was able to, but possibly get more out of it–or at least something valuably new out of it.
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I’m afraid that’s all for now. I had a meeting of my local writers’ group to go to and when I got back, I was shot.
Note: I had this one done on time but forgot to make it pubic.
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Entry 1217 — Old Age
Wednesday, September 18th, 2013
After typing the beginning of a short essay on my ageism, I found out I had suddenly gotten a day behind here. So I needed to do two entries. I decided the one for yesterday would be brief, and about old age since I’d already put it in that category. Ergo, my opinion about being old: it stinks. More about it in my entry for today.
As for the 18th of September, I did get something done on it: my latest Scientific American blog entry, although it won’t posted until Saturday, or maybe late Friday night. I also worked on multiplication poems for dogs, one for my dentist and one for a local writer-friend. I had silly ideas for a while that I could make money selling personalized copies of the thing, but soon realized there was no chance of that–although I hope to try it.
Okay, now to try to get today’s entry done, in spite of being already all worn out.
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the word ‘poetry’ within the two word term ‘visual poetry’ frames the discussion. we are not saying visual calligraphy nor graphics poetry, nor comix poetry etc.
as long as you focus on your self centered lexicon rather than seek an universal point of viewing, all this is perhaps a talking passed each other.
to continue: because of the steady decline since its peak in the early 1990′s, and because the term visual poetry was coined circa 1965 to break away from the limits of what became concrete poetry, i now prefer the use of sound illumination or illuminated language/s to cover all the visual (must see to fully grasp) use of language that can be composed. the best visual poetry is but a small subset as a result of what took place in the 1990’s. the following is a very abridged outline as to my shift.
just as concrete became cliché, what has become american vizpo/vispo (a term i used since the late 1970′s onward in my correspondence as an abbreviation for visual poetry), much american vispo, since the mid 1990’s attempted take over by a certain click of the language poets, has become neo/retro concrete. many american visual poets aloud themselves to be hypnotized (or consciously gave themselves over) by a perceived center of power of the moment to serve in order to gain recognition and or power, rather than serve the eternal muse of poetry.
vispo is now a cliché. it is no wonder the title of a forthcoming anthology is called the last vispo anthology. the editors themselves not only unconsciously have announced its death but also date its birth as 1950’s concrete movement (: “The Last Vispo Anthology extends the dialectic between art and literature that began with the concrete poetry movement fifty years ago.”) they themselves and those within this particular group consciousness admit they work in a temporal moment without homage to the eternal muse.
visual poetry roots are many thousands of years deep. illuminated language and its ancestral pictorial pictographic petroglyphic images even deeper. those not knowing history are condemned to repeat it. that is obviously true for those cutting history of this form off at 1950.
Interesting entirely unself-centered take on the history of visual poetry, Karl. But, as I point out, your definition of visual poetry is too general. If you disagree with that, you need to present an argument against it. You need to show, for instance, either that poems like “cropse” are visual poems, or why such poems need not be considered visual poems by your definition.
I would add that naming things for political reasons the way you say visual poetry was, retards the search for truth. But “visual poetry” is a good term. It is a good term because it specifies a kind of poetry that is specifically verbal and visual, and not, like concrete poetry, concrete in some other way, such as tactilely. That is why it is in my taxonomy. I would add that almost all concrete poetry is also visual poetry.
‘Visual Poetry is a Poetry that has to be seen.’ can be taken as a definition maybe. But lots of problems here, first of all, written poetry can be seen also. There is a form there and it is not always the same, especially after the free verse. Second, we have to ask maybe where a poem happens? This answer has to be relative. If it is in the paper, well, but what if it is in readers mind, relation to these signs (word, punctuation, structure etc)? If we can define where a poem happens, then we can talk about the eye and visual? But usually a poem happens between reader and the paper, reader “completes” the work as Duchamp mentioned.
Your problem with the definition can be taken care of easily by amending it to “Visual Poetry is a Poetry that has to be seen for full appreciation of its main aesthetic cargo.” The way a conventional poem looks on the page is not part of its main aesthetic cargo. Nor would the calligraphication of its letters be. The problems with it that I point out remain: it would cover too much that is not visual poetry, such as the pwoermd, “cropse,” and illustrated poems (which many artists who make them consider visual poems. A definition should always be as simple as possible, but simplicity rarely works.
As for where a poem happens, it seems clear to me that it happens in the mind. But rationally to define poetry, one needs to consider only what a poem is materially, which is generally word-shaped ink on a page, but which can include visual and other kinds of elements. And, of course, can be in the air as word-shaped sounds.
@Grumman; “The way a conventional poem looks on the page is not part of its main aesthetic cargo” How about thinking Mayakovski and other Russian Formalists and Futurists poems? I know these are not “conventional” but in a certain way they are modern now. How about haiku? and how about arabic or persian poetry for ages that has lot to do with the typography or calligraphy, ideograms etc where language or the sign is not just a carrier for meaning, it has the meaning only by itself. In western thinking these are not may be considered or not taken as main-frame but visual poetry has lots of roots with the “graphic-writing” history of the writing. If you are a verbal poet or as Ong say “verbomotor poet” these has minor importance but other way, every structural element has critical importance i guess. And how can we be sure that cargo, can be carried easily by any means and chance of the Language? Is poetry that good at that kind of information (communication)?
I think it’s a matter of a case by case decision whether a given poem’s aesthetic cargo is visual enough to make the poem a visual poem. I simply subjectively do not feel calligraphy (in most cases) does so. It’s decorative only. Spacing in poems isn’t enough, either, in my subjective view. I don’t see how haiku are visual. Chinese ideagrams may seem very visual to westerners but are essentially composed of symbols that are read, not seen.
As for language’s ability to carry an aesthetic cargo, I assume without the help of its visual arrangement and decoration, I simply subjectively believe that words can carry huge amounts of meaning and that in a good poem that meaning makes things like calligraphy minor.
One has to make subjective decisions like that or give up defining things. It seems to me that you are basically calling for a definition of visual poetry too broad to be useful. What isn’t visual poetry if haiku are or, apparently, any hand-written poem is?
i would have to say, the use of the phrase ‘eternal muse of poetry’ seems ridiculous here. taking wide sloppy swings at people you do nothing but miss and waste our time.
karl kempton sevişelim mi?
Concrete poem represents deep feeling