Entry 469 — A Personal Problem « POETICKS-

Entry 469 — A Personal Problem « POETICKS

Entry 469 — A Personal Problem

My standard arguments against the application of the term, “visual poetry,” to works without words, or without words that contribute significantly to their central aesthetic meaning have long been: (1) expanding the coverage of the term to just about any conceivable somebody or other wants to call a visual poem–which, of course, renders it worthless as a tool of description; and (2) it breaks with the practice of several thousand years of considering poetry a literary art, and therefore requiring words; why change a meaning so drastically that’s worked so well for so long? With regard to (2) let me add that, yes, the meaning of “poetry” was expanded to included free verse, and just about all such terms need to be at least a little flexible, but free verse poems continued to use the majority of devices that metrical verse did, and remained a literary art (and as such, I claim, continued to achieve its most important effects in the verbal area of the human brain, not elsewhere in the brain, and certainly not elsewhere in the brain and not in the verbal area of the brain).

I have a third problem with what I consider the misuse of the term, though–a personal one. It is that as people encounter works like many of those in the new (excellent) collection at Illuminated Script: 30 Years of Visual Poetry & Intermedia that are called “visual poems” although they are without aesthetically significant words or even textual elements and are thus conditioned not to expect anything called a visual poem to be verbally meaningful. Ergo, unless I call my combinations of words and graphics “visual poems containing significant words,” those encountering them will take them as perhaps pleasant designs but not trouble to work out what they much more importantly are due to their words. In short, my own works will suffer because of the way others mislabel theirs.

True, few will care about my works even after alerted to the fact that the words in them are not just graphically-designed into them. Still . . .

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 17th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Announcements, Poetics, Taxonomy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “Entry 469 — A Personal Problem”

karl kempton says:

17 July 11 at 2:25 PM

note term in title– intermedia
Ed Baker says:

17 July 11 at 2:32 PM

SHE
walking down Houston
in a wet-dress clinging
to that image with-in
& with-out
in a single word:

pure-poetry-in-motion

not a single need/want to cut-&-paste
Bob Grumman says:

18 July 11 at 6:42 AM

I admit I was thinking of your show as a collection of visual poetry, Karl. I fear most people will mistake it as such. But my problem is not with it but with the extremely wide-spread notion, which I fear your introduction to your show does little to address, that an artwork need not have words or even textual elements to be a visual poem.

Ed: a poem can be a metaphor for a woman but it can’t be a woman.
Ed Baker says:

18 July 11 at 9:51 AM

yeah & thank Gawd
(whoever she may be)

for the difference

or

in the immortal words of

(what’s her name) :
“I never saw a poem as lovely as a tree”

the last time I kissed “her” I got a mouth-full of wet oil-based paint
of
a Blood-Red persuasion

so

I called her bluff and named her DIOTIMA

525 pages later she turned from ink into stone …

full moon
I think I’m in love
with a rock
karl kempton says:

18 July 11 at 7:41 PM

bob,

given the wide spectrum of modern and post modern art, your demands are older than 100 years in the rear view mirror. look at art and music on the experimental frontiers: single colored canvases over 50 years ago, music scores of one note hours long over 50 years ago. films of a building days long . . .

u forget poetic gesture (jest), accent, etc not being words but very poetic. u r being very literal and o so very non visual. can not fractured sounds of speech be made visual with broken letters not words . . .

also y i am now using “sound illumination” to get away from nit pickers.

is not the actual heading of the entire collection “illuminated script”? it is a door wide open to possibilities to illuminate mind(s).
Bob Grumman says:

9 August 11 at 6:38 PM

Just saw this post of your today, Karl. Not sure what you’re talking about. You have a bad habit of avoiding specifics.

Of course “fractured sounds of speech” can “be made visual.” So what? If they do nothing semantic, they are not poetry, by everyone’s definition of poetry for thousands of years. Sure, gestures can be “poetic.” So can kangaroos. Which means any word can be used metaphorically. But in verosophy the purpose is to define things objectively, unmetaphorically. Only then can words be used to communicate knowledge.

I continue not to see what “sound illumination” or “illuminated script” mean–without definitions attached.

–Bob

Entry 477– Re-Defining, Again! « POETICKS

Entry 477– Re-Defining, Again!

Yeah, for almost forty years now I’ve been defining and re-defining visual poetry, often returning to old definitions. Believe it or not, I’m trying to come up with one others will accept–without letting it go as “undefinable,” or–worse–infinitely-definable. I think I may
have it now–but I always think that when I advance a new definition. This one is only slightly new. What’s new is the sub-categories I split it into. Okay, here goes:

Visual Poetry is an artwork containing a verbal and a graphic constituent in which part or the whole of the semantic meaning of the verbal constituent and part or the whole of the representa-tional meaning of the graphic constituent each makes a centrally significant contribution to the core aesthetic effect of the work.

It comes in two varieties: visiophorical and visiocollagic poetry. Visiophorical Poetry is Visual Poetry part or the whole of whose graphic constituent acts as a metaphor for part or the whole of what its verbal constituent denotes that makes a centrally significant contribution to the core aesthetic effect of the work.

Visiocollagic Poetry is Visual Poetry part or the whole of whose graphic constituent combines ametaphorically with part or the whole of the semantic meaning of its verbal element in such a
manner as to make a centrally significant contribution (in the view of a consensus of informed observers) to the core aesthetic effect of the work.

An awkward set of definitions but necessarily so.

I’ve decided a main reason it’s taken me so long to get a final set of poetics definitions is that I’m treating poetics as a verosophy–or attempt to come to a rational, objective understanding of some consequential large-scale aspect of existence sufficiently close to full for any reasonable person–and there are very few people (especially in the arts) interested (or, probably, qualified for) such an undertaking. Those few who are, are off in their own wilder-nesses, not mine, or involved in a group effort as most of the sciences are. In short, I’m basically without help–although occasionally I have gotten useful feedback. I’m also over-extended–which is my fault.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Poetics, Taxonomy, Terminology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Entry 354 — A Few Further Thoughts on Taxonomization « POETICKS

Entry 354 — A Few Further Thoughts on Taxonomization

First, another thought about taxonomy: an effective taxonomy will have lacuna that its structure makes readily fillable. The Periodic Table of Elements is a prime example.

And an anecdote in support of the high value of taxonomization. It concerns one of my many small possible discoveries while working on my knowlecular psychology. It was that despite the standard view of certified psychologists, there is no such thing as “short-term memory,” there is only “memory.” In other words, we don’t store recent events in one section of the brain for some short period than release the unimportant ones, and shift the important ones to another section of the brain devoted to long-term memories. I always had trouble with this because I could see no way of evaluating short-term memories–how, for instance, could the brain pick out some memory that might be crucially important ten years down the road however irrelevant at the moment? Where taxonomization came in was that I was at the same time driven to make my taxonomy as compact as possible. Limit the number of classifications. That’s a prime goal of any taxonomist. So I worked to eliminate the short-term memory and long-term-memory as subcategories of “memory.” It was many years before I found a very simple, elegant solution–a way the brain could tag all incoming data in such a way that one’s faculty of remembering would tend to choose recent events before older events (of equal contextual attractiveness–i.e., if you just met someone named Mary and your wife is named Mary, the name Mary will probably still more likely bring up a memory of your wife than of the new Mary you’ve met, but if your wife’s name is Judy, than the name will bring up a memory of the new Mary faster than it will bring up some other acquaintance of yours who has that name, to put it very simply).

I claim that taxonomization significantly helped me to my breakthrough this time, and many other times. If my psychology proves invalid that may seem a so what, but I also claim that taxonomization is similarly helpful to successful theorists.

I think the reason I’m such an advocate for taxonomy is my work throughout the years to construct a full-scale psychology. Reflecting on it, I realize that what I’ve mostly done has been taxonomization–defining items and systematically classifying them. Such informal taxonomization is essential for any serious full understanding of a versosophy (any verosoplex, that is), including ones more respected than mine. I’ve read about some of the research that’s been done in this area, by the way, and don’t find any of it to contradict my theory; in fact, the researchers seem to me empiricists without little idea of what they’re doing. They’re certainly not concerned with a big picture.

When I have more pep, I hope to be a little more specific about how I’ve worked out my theory, beginning with the universe, the activity of the brain, which I divide into perception, retroception (memory) and behavior.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 21st, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Autobiographica, Knowlecular Psychology, Taxonomy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Archive for the ‘Knowlecular Psychology’ Category

Entry 346 — The Definition of Visual Poetry, Yet Again

Thursday, January 13th, 2011

In a comment to the entry Geof Huth made to his blog about my taxonomy, Kaz Maslanka said, “I like what I understand to be Karl Kempton and Karl Young’s definition of: ‘Visual Poetry is a Poetry that has to be seen.’ This is such a simple yet powerful definition that seems to me to be true in every case of vizpo that I have seen.”

My definition is not so simple–because while the double-Karl definition probably does cover every case of visual poetry, it fails to distinguish certain works that I do not consider visual poetry: illustrated poems and captioned or labeled visimages; ordinary poems whose visual appearance has been improved by calligraphy or special graphic touches like ornate capitals at the beginning of stanzas–poetry, in other words that has been graphically decorated enough to make it more pleasing but not enough to significantly increase its aesthetic effect; certain infraverbal texts like Joyce’s “cropse,” which must be seen to be appreciated but are not visual, if by “visual” we mean “of any special interest to the eye.” Of course, the definition works for those for whom just about any combination of textual and graphic material is visual poetry–but then we would still need a special term for artworks in which the interrelation of words and graphics causes has a significant aesthetic effect (or is intended to). For that, the double-Karl definition won’t work, and that more than any of the other combinations of text and graphics is what requires definition. Because, in my view, only that will jolt an engagent in both the reading section and the seeing section of his brain simultaneously, or nearly simultaneously.

This latter, by the way, is only one example of the way that my taxonomy of poetry is, like a proper theory of science, falsifiable. Eventually superior forms of cat-scans will be able to determine where in the brain different forms of poetry are appreciated. I claim each of the main kinds I classify will have a unique brainprint. Moreover, that brainprint will prove close to exactly what one would expect it to be: visual poems, by my definition, will have a visioverbal brainprint (which will be different from textual designs’ visiotextual brainprint); linguexclusive poems will have a purely verbal brainprint–initially, for most of them will give rise to visual imagery; avisual mathematical poems will have a purely verbomathematical brainprint, but visiomathematical poems will have a visioverbomathematical brainprint. The brainprints of more specialized poems–particular kinds of visual poems should–if my taxonomy is valid and my theory of psychology right–each have its own unique visioverbal brainprint.

One brainprint that especially intrigues is the one a cryptographic poem would have. It’d have to be verbal, of course, but also something caused by a conceptual part of the brain I haven’t worked out yet. Okay, crazy maybe, but don’t be too sure about that until it’s tested.

Posted in Knowlecular Psychology, Poetics, Taxonomy | 9 Comments »

Entry 276 — The Irratioplex

Saturday, November 6th, 2010

Another day in the null zone for me, perhaps because I’m going without the pain pills I’ve been on for my bad hip as an experiment. I played tennis this morning without any more of the slight hip pain I’ve been having with the pain pills. That was nice but since I got home from that and a little marketing (for socks and new sneakers), I I’ve been feeling blah. A nap didn’t help.

Meanwhile, I’m been feeling bitter about my reputation as a defender of Shakespeare. SHAKSPER, an Internet discussion group I’m in, has for several days been discussing the proper reaction to a movie coming out called Anonymous, in which the Earl of Oxford is depicted as Shakespeare–and as Queen Elizabeth’s son–and Southampton is depicted as Oxford and Elizabeth’s son. I think it may destroy Oxfordianism the way the preposterous codes found in Shakespeare’s plays “proving” Bacon wrote them pretty much destroyed Baconism.

What irks me is that several who comment at SHAKSPER mentioned James Shapiro’s recent book on the authorship question, and books and articles on it by others, but not my book. No doubt I’m biased, but I consider my book the best refutation of anti-Stratfordianism in print, and the only one that presents a serious theory of what makes people become anti-Stratfordianism–whether valid or not. Yet the Shakespeare establishment, and their little followers at the two authorship sites I participate in don’t mention me, or respond to my posts to SHAKSPER. Maybe they don’t want it known that our side has a crank like me on it. A crank, morover, who calls anti-Stratfordians “psitchotics.”

Nonetheless, my attempt to understand what causes reasonably intelligent people to become psitchotics where Shakespeare is concerned, and–more important–find a way to express my finding entertainingly and coherently, continues, with a minor development today, the new term “irratioplex.” This I pronounce ehr RAH shuh plehks. Do I misspell it? Possibly, but “irratiplex” doesn’t do it for me.

And irratioplex is an irrational knowleplex. There are several. Two of them are the rigidniplex and the enthusiaplex. I now maintain that all anti-Stratfordians are afflicted with one or the other of these two irratioplexes. The new term allows me to couple them as victims of irratioplexes, then show how they differ from one another by virtue of their (slightly) different irratioplexes. The rigidniks’ irratioplex is forced on them by their innate psychology; the enthusiasts’ (who are frrewenders) acquire their irratioplexes during fits of enthiuiasm, making them quickly too strong thereafter to resist. Both irratioplexes act the same once active. both nearly impossible for their victims’ to resist.

My new strategy for the description of wacks is to concentrate on irratioplexes in general, proceed to rigidniplexes and enthusiaplexes in general, then to how the latter two specifically enslave their victims to anti-Stratfordianism.

Posted in Autobiographica, Grumman coinage, Knowlecular Psychology | No Comments »

Entry 269 — Problem-Solving

Saturday, October 30th, 2010

When faced with a mess as bad as my attempt to work of how we process language is in, as shown by yesterday’s entry, and with no idea what to do about it, a sound reaction is to drop it and go on to something else, with or without exclamations of despair. Or one can try anyway to do something about it. What I think is a clever response is to think of it as A General Problem, and try to work up procedures that may be of value in solving it. That way, you can imagine that you are working out a Method of Attack which may help others, or yourself in the future–even if it fails, since then it will indicate actions not to repeat. At the same time you can deal with a possibly intractable problem from a distance that takes some of the pressure off you.

So, my first thought is to focus on one element of the problem, with my main intent being to clarify what it is and what I need to understand in order to make sense of it rather than go all out fully to explain it. First question: where to begin. To decide that, I think I need to list all the elements involved. That, in fact, was mainly what I was trying to do yesterday. (Phooey. That means I have to read what I wrote yesterday!)

Okay, thew elements seem to be the word-flows: heard, read, said (formerly “spoken,” but “said” rhymes with “read,” so I like it better) and . . . mathematical (because I can’t think of a nice short, or even long, verb to use–assuming “heard,” “read” and “said” are verbs, something unimportant but would like to know). “Mathed.” No, not really, but it’s a temptation.

My problem now is that I have this intuition that I ought to be dealing with more than the four word-flows so far named. One might be the grammatical word-flow. I want to add a rhythmical word-flow, but tend to consider rhythm too insignificant compared to the others to merit a word-flow. I don’t like “rhythmical” as an adjective here, either. Maybe I’ll try “word-beat-flow”. . .

I’m going to think about it. I may try to finish a portion of a mathemaku I’m working on, too. I was going to use it today but found it as difficult to get in shape as the linguistics. I know I can get it in shape, though–it’ll just take a lot of drudgery.

Posted in Knowlecular Psychology, Linguistics | No Comments »

Entry 268 — More Thoughts on Linguistics, Sputterfully

Friday, October 29th, 2010

Gosh, kids, I’m finding out that language-Processing is pretty durned complicated. One thing that makes it so is its having to do with responding in kind to its input, something that doesn’t happen elsewhere in the brain, that I can think of right now, so now strikes me as particularly interesting. I had to take a break from thinking about it to clear my synapses. I think they’re clear now, but I still feel over-matched by my opponent. I’m not conceding the game, though.

First, another coinage: Ultilinguiceptuality. That’s where all the “word-flows” occurring in the Ultilinguiceptual Awareness, or final language-processing area in the brain, end up. I propose, very tentatively, that four word-flows can arise in the cerebrum, the heard word-flow, the read word-flow, the spoken word-flow and the mathematical word-flow.

Some of what I’m now saying may contradict previous statements of mine. But this is definitely a sketch-in-progress.

The heard word-flow starts in the auditory pre-awareness in which a syllable-identifier sensitive to sounds representing language. When the syllable-identifiers identifies an incoming datum as a syllable (which includes what I call “nulletters”–but may call “nullybles”–for pauses between syllables that are those part of the word-flow), it forms a verbiceptual percept of the datum. This percept it relays to a second linguistic-identificatioon mechanism which determines whether the percept is rhythmiceptual and metriceptual, If either, a rhythmiceptual or metriceptual percept will be fashioned, or both, and sent with the verbiceptual perceptto the verbiceptual subawareness in the linguiceptual subawareness of the Reducticeptual Awareness. The activation of the m-cells in the verbiceptual sub-awareness will be experienced as the heard word-flow.

The pre-visual awareness cointains a texteme-identifier that separates signals from stimuli that are letters and other textual data from visual data and constructs lexiceptual percepts from them which are sent to the pre-lexiceptual subawareness where a grammar identifier mechanism will tag strings of letters nouns, verbs, prepostitions and other parts of speech. At the same time the mechanism will determine the inflection to be given verbs and give them tags indicating what tense they are. The tags will actually be accompanying percepts. The linguiceptual percepts and their “tags” will end in the lexiceptual sub-awareness of the linguiceptual subawareness of the Reducticeptual Awareness, froming the the read word-flow.

When a person speaks, sensors in the neck pass on data to the dicticeptual sub-awareness where they activate m-cells having to do with the sounds the vocal cords have just made. The subject will experience the spoken word-flow. All word-flows active at a given time will join in the ultilinguistic subawareness to form the total word-flow. Here they will interact with input from most of the awarenesses in the Protoceptual Awareness to permit words to connect with what they symbolically represent.

Warning, what I’ve just written is a blur. Consider it an extreme first draft intended to show the complexities involved with trying to figure out how the brain processes language. It makes no sense. But it is now in a form I hope I can think about effectively enough to make a better clutter–to think about until I make a still better one, and so on, until I have something that makes sense. To me, if to no one else. I’ve succeeded in doing that before, so maybe I can again, although this may be the most complicated problem I’ve yet dealt with.

Later note: I forgot about the mathematical word-flow. I posit an identifier that sorts mathematical textemes from non-mathematical textemes, and sends them to a purely mathematical awareness outside the linguiceptual awareness, but sends all the mathematical textemes along with non-mathematical textemes to the linguiceptual wareness hwere they participate as words–that is, amathematically.

Also note that I am confusing stimuli with results of stimuli, and probably with transmitted energy, and neuro-transmitters. My next task, it would seem, will be getting that straightened out–because it’s a straight-forward job which should not be difficult, although it may take a while.

Posted in Knowlecular Psychology, Linguistics | 3 Comments »

Entry 267 — A Project Expansion

Thursday, October 28th, 2010

A problem of people like me is the tendency of our projects to expand. A form of impracticality. It’s struck me again. I want simply to self-publish my taxonomy of poetry, mainly so my Runaway Spoon Press will get a title into print for the twenty-third year in a row, but also because it’s worth getting into print. Immediately, it became a taxonomy of more then just poetry, although I’m not sure just what more. Except that it would include things like “utilitry,” or man-made items to make life easier rather than better. And the taxonomy didn’t start with poetry or literature but at the very beginning with reality, then matter and mind.

It is now expanding through a definition of poetry that I’ve decided requires me to explain how our nervous systems process poetry . . . which requires me to describe how they process words. That now has been trying to figure out and coherently describe my theory of an innate grammar. Which, I’ve just discovered, means I must tackle the process of generalization. I’m excited by that, because I think it has led to a concept of a process that makes generalizations automatic that I hadn’t previously come close to thinking might be in the mix. If I can make my idea of it work, it would elegantly explain quite a few things that our brains do.

But it makes me fear I’ll never get my taxonomy done.

I’ll keep you informed.

Posted in Autobiographica, Knowlecular Psychology | No Comments »

Entry 266 — The Pre-Awareness Revisited

Wednesday, October 27th, 2010

Long after the first organisms with protoceptuality came into being, and some of them had developed other awarenesses, the most advanced of them found it biologically useful to split their protoceptual aware-nesses in two. One of these remained the protoceptual awareness, the other became the pre-awareness.

The Pre-Awareness gradually become quite complex in the higher species, becoming for us a sort of confederacy of primary pre-awarenesses, one for each of the senses. Each primary pre-awareness has become in turn a confederacy of specialized secondary pre-awarenesses such as the visiolinguistic pre-awareness in the visual pre-awareness and the audiolinguistic pre-awareness in the auditory pre-awareness. Each incoming perceptual cluster (or “pre-knowlecule,” or “knowlecule-in-progress,” by which I mean cluster of percepts, or “atoms of perception,” which have the potential to form full-scale pieces of knowledge such as the visual appearance of a robin, that I call “knowlecules”) enters one of the primary pre-awarenesses, from which it is sent to all the many secondary pre-awarenesses within that primary pre-awareness.

The secondary pre-awarenesses, in turn, screen the pre-knowlecules entering them, accepting for further processing those they are designed to, rejecting all others. The visiolinguistic pre-awareness thus accepts percepts that pass its tests for textuality, and reject all others; the audiolinguistic pre-awareness tests for speech; and so on. All this, remember, is as my theory describes it. However, much of conventional neurophysiuology, especially concerning mechanisms in the eyes and areas between the eyes and the visual center in the brain (which is in the occipital lobe, if I remember rightly) has established the existence of such processes, although few, probably, act too much like my hypothetical ones. Some do act like mine, processes in the eyes or just behind them, for instance, that recognize circles and lines. It is a fault of mine that I can’t match my hypothetical processes to the known ones due to lack of familiarity with conventional terminology. Another fault of mine is that I can’t draw on the evidence conventional science has turned up to support what I say about my theory’s processes. I feel my time is much more valuably spent on thinking my way to undiscovered processes, incompletely understood known processes, and how they might be organized than on work anyone in the field could do, though.

Ideally, I could call on grad students to take care of these side-jobs, or even, if grants ever went to people actually significantly furthering knowledge, take care of them myself (which I think would be fun doing) because freed from all the things that are screwing up my life because of impoverishment, including I firmly believe my bouts of blah.

Okay, that’s it for my whining–for today, at any rate.

Back to the Pre-Awareness, which I need to give its full name, to wit: “protoceptual pre-awareness. Aside from being a relay station for reports from all the senses, glands and muscles, the protoceptual pre-awareness has an area, the visual pre-awarreness, that I hypothesize as having broken off from the visual awareness fairly early on to become a visual detail-awareness center. It contained processes that identified significant visual details such as the human figure, the human face, landscape features, motion, geometrical shape, and so forth. Eventually when human beings began marking things, and the marks became ideograms and then letters, a texteme-identifier became one of the processes that evolved in the visual pre-awareness. Textemes are the smallest units of textual meaning in my linguistics. Basically letters, numerals and punctuation marks. The basis of language, and hence of poetry.

Similarly, an auditory pre-awareness evolved with a syllable-identifier sensitive to sounds representing language. This word-identifier and the texteme-identifier transmitted energy to the Linguiceptual Awareness in the reducticeptual awareness. This area is divided into lesser sub-awarenesses, five of which are the Lexiceptual, the Verbiceptual, Dicticeptual, Vocaceptual, Rhythmiceptual and Metriceptual. The first is an charge of the written word, the second of the spoken word, the third of vocalization, the fourth of the rhythm of speech and the fifth of the meter of speech. All five of the linguiceptual sub-awarenesses transmit to a further sub-awareness, the Linguassociative Awareness, which receives input from most of the awarenesses in the Protoceptual Awareness to permit words to connect with what they symbolically represent.

There are also grammatical awarenesses in the linguiceptual awareness. These are too complicated for me to deal with right now.

Posted in Knowlecular Psychology | No Comments »

Entry 264 — On the Ten Awarenesses, Again

Monday, October 25th, 2010

I’ve been reworking my thoughts on the ten awarenesses (or abilities or intelligences, whatever you want to call them) that I so far posit, as part of the essay I’m writing on the taxonomy of poetry I’ve devel- oped. Some of them will play role in my taxonomy. Kinds of poetry, for instance, will be partially defined by what areas of the brain–what awarenesses, that is–they primarily activate. I haven’t added much to what I previously posted here at my blog, but I added a few guesses about the evolution of the awarenesses that I consider rather interesting.

The Ten Awarenesses

I’ll begin with the protoceptual awareness because it was almost certainly the first, or “proto” awareness to evolve. Hence, it was the ancestor of the other nine awarenesses, and the one all forms of life have in some form. As, I believe, most real theoretical psychologists would agree. Some but far from all would also agree with my belief in multiple awarenesses, although probably not with my specific choice of them. It has much in common with and was no doubt influenced by Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. It is much more advanced and much less superficial than his, however.

The protoceptual awareness deals with reality in the raw: directly with what’s out there, in other words–visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory stimuli. It also deals directly with what’s inside its possessor, muscular and hormonal states. Hence, I divide it into three sub-awarenesses, the Sensoriceptual, Viscraceptual and Musclaceptual Awarenesses. The other nine awarenesses are (2) the Behavraceptual Awareness, (3) the Evaluceptual Awareness, (4) the Cartoceptual Awareness, (5) the Anthroceptual Awareness, (6) the Sagaceptual Awareness, (7) the Objecticeptual Awareness, (8) the Reducticeptual Awareness, (9) the Scienceptual Awareness, and (10) the Compreceptual Awareness.

24 May 2011 note: I may return to “fundaceptual” from “protoceptual.” I dropped “fundaceptual” to free “funda” up for use in another coinage of mine, but can’t remember now what coinage it was. I’m also considering “execuceptual” in place of “behavraceptual.”

The Behavraceptual Awareness is concerned with causing behavior, and telling you of it. It is the only awareness that does anything but store memories, and cause remembering.

At this point, I need to make a metaphysical digression. I could skip it, because it is irrelevant, but I want to be thorough. When I speak of “you,” I actually mean what I call your “urwareness,” or fundamental conxciousness of the universe, which is somehow connected to “your” body.” It does nothing but observe what your brain tells is in “your” environment and what actions “your” brain has taken. Your urwareness, no doubt, will think it was the one causing said actions, it will have had nothing to do with them, however; it will merely have observed what the brain it is attached to chose to do and did.

I believe all this because I can conceive of no way mind could have any influence on matter, since it is itself immaterial, or by definition without material effect. The question as to how it connects in any manner to anything material is leave as an Eternal Unanswerable–a simpler unanswerable since it’s only about how an awareness can be aware of matter, not about that and how it can tell matter what to do, which matter can easily do by following the law of cause and effect without any input.

But “I” am sure “you,” like my urwareness, will feel more comfortable believing that “you” initiate “your” behavior. No problem: I can, and will hereafter, drop the italics (which I’ve been dispensing with till now, anyway), and advance from the position that behavraceptual awareness is concerned with carrying out your orders and describing to you what you have made it do in each instance.

The Evaluceptual Awareness has, like the protoceptual awareness, been around forever, I believe, although–unlike the protoceptual awareness–it need not have been. It measures the ratio of pain to pleasure one experiences during an “instacon” (or instant of consciousness) and causes one to feel one or the other, or neither, depending on the value of that ratio. In other words, it is in charge of our emotional state.

The Cartoceptual Awareness tells one where one is in space and time. I imagine this was another early awareness, but not as early as the three preceding ones.

The Sagaceptual Awareness is one’s awareness of oneself as the protagonist of some narrative in which one has a goal one tries to achieve. It evolved to help motivate an organism to become aware of consequential goals such as escaping a predator or defeating and devouring prey and persist in the achievement of it, something which, again, would probably have developed early in our rise to humanhood.

The Objecticeptual Awareness is sensitive to inanimate objects. My guess is that it began a few eons after the protoceptual awareness did, in order to separate neutral entities in the environment for entities which might be predator or prey.

Sensitivity to the latter entities, as distinct from objects was the basis of what become the Anthroceptual Awareness, which has to do with our experience of ourselves as individuals and as social beings (so is divided into two sub-awareness, the egoceptual awareness and the socioceptual awareness). The “society” it is sensitive to includes many other life-forms, some of which no doubt cohabit the society of living beings, and the company of objects that the objecticaptual awareness is concerned with.

The Reducticeptual Awareness is basically our conceptual intelligence. It reduces protoceptual data to abstract symbols like words and numbers and deals with them (and has many sub-awarenesses). It would seem to have come late, biologically. On the other hand, there were probably primitive forms of it early on, such as a sense of the difference between one and many.

The Scienceptual Awareness deals with cause and effect, and may be the latest of our awarenesses to have evolved.

Finally, there is the Compreceptual Awareness,which is our awareness of our entire personal reality. I’m still vague about it, but tend to believe it did not precede the protoceptual awareness but later formed when some ancient life-form’s number of separate awarenesses required some general intelligence to co:ordinate their doings.

Posted in Awarenesses, Knowlecular Psychology | No Comments »

Entry 252 — 12 October 2010 Report

Tuesday, October 12th, 2010

I did more work on my essay concerning aesthetics. I’m burned out on it now, but it’s still not right. I have to leave it for a while. I’m burned out on about everything, it would appear. Can’t think of anything concerning poetry I feel like writing about. My heath seems okay, and I’m not sleepy. The pain pills I’ve been taking have helped with that, and with my hip, which held up moderately well earlier when I played tennis. I think I’ll need hip replacement surgery, anyway. I want to get a shot for my hip before I do, though. I’m hopeful that will be enough to get me back to feeling the way I think I should.

Possible rough draft currently taking shape:

. Poem, Nearing the Center

.
. Swans wrinkled
. against Poem’s current memory of
. Excalibur
. multiplied by lake-grey branches
. simpling deeper than winter.
. A bridge hand glows
. through a made finesse
. toward game bid and made
. in the wake of
. Brillo pads renewing the white shine
. of a toilet bowl.
. Holy smoke
. so slowly centering
. the universe
. as the next hand is dealt.
. Model T’s coming off the
. assembly line
. proving mankind
. ocean-eminent
.
.
.

Posted in Autobiographica, Knowlecular Psychology, Nothing Much, Of Poem | No Comments »

Entry 251 — “Homage to Shakespeare”

Monday, October 11th, 2010

I keep directing my Shakespeare authorship friends and enemies to this poem, but none has commented on it, that I recall. I tend to think Shakespeare fans rarely are much interested in newer forms of poetry. I made it around twenty years ago. It was the first of my visual poems to get accepted for Kaldron, the leading American visual poetry magazine of the time (but international in scope). Unfortu- nately, I can’t show it large enough for the small print to be visible her.

Here’s an annotated detail of it showing what the small print says.

Posted in Aesthetics, Knowlecular Psychology | No Comments »

Entry 250 — Going in Reverse

Monday, October 11th, 2010

I now know more about pleasure and pain than I understand. My problem, I think, is that what I know seems right, but I can’t organize it into any kind of neat, accessible package. The thing bothering me is what beauty is. I once pegged it as simply the right ratio of pleasure to pain a stimulus produces. Then I remembered something obvious to almost everyone but me: that there are stimuli that are automatically perceived by healthy minds as beautiful. Nothing wrong with two kinds of beauty, but the two seemed to me too different from one another to share a name. Next thing you know, I’d have to accept an elegant mathematical proof as beautiful. Okay in bull sessions, but not if one is concerned with useful serious communication since a term loses its linguistic value to the degree that it can be applied to significantly different things.

So, how about calling the stimulus with the proper familiarity to unfamiliarity ratio . . . ? I can’t think of anything. There’s the beauty our instincts are sensitive to, and the truth our instincts about what contradicts, what harmonizes, are sensitive to. Empathy would be what our instincts derive pleasure from when interacting with others–that which is anthroceptually pleasurable, in terms of knowlecular psychology. There’s good, too, or the pleasure–instinctive in many cases–we feel when we, or others, act in a manner we consider moral.

Okay, folks, I have to turn to neologization, again. “Assimlatry.” That is now my term for any stimulus causes that has the right r/f ratio (or “resolution/frustration” ratio, resolution being what happens when a psychevent leads to the familiar, frustration being what happens when it leads to unfamiliarity). “Assimlatrous” is the adjectival form. Yes, grotesque terms, but naming is the first step toward understanding, and essential.

There’s also the need for the instinctive pleasure one feels when achieving a goal. “Triumph” may be sufficient. No, I think “success” better. And “resolution” for “assimilatry.” No, no” “comprehension” is the perfect name for it! So, I have the following pairing on my list of kinds of pleasure and pain (with which of my theory’s awareness’s is involved in each case):

instinct-based evaluception

beauty/ ugliness: fundaceptual evaluception
empathy/ hostility: personal anthroceptual evaluception
good/ bad: moral anthroceptual evaluception
success/ failure: sagaceptual evaluception

logic-based evaluception

truth/ error: reducticeptual evaluception

experience-based evaluception

comprehension/ perplexity: combiceptual evaluception

I think I may be getting somewhere, after all. And, wow, a list of terms none of which is a coinage! (I mean aside from the names of my awarenesses.)

Posted in Aesthetics, Knowlecular Psychology | No Comments »

Entry 350 — Re: the Value of Taxonomy « POETICKS

Entry 350 — Re: the Value of Taxonomy

My good friend Geof Huth has challenged me to demonstrate why taxonomization is of value. At first, I was somewhat dumbfounded by his belief that it was, if not useless, not of major importance. Able occasionally to illuminate but not able to do so well enough for one to make a life-long project of, as I have. I have always taken it as a given that an effective taxonomy is of value–of crucial value–in all fields. Linnaeus’s Taxonomy, Mendeleyev’s Periodic Table of Elements, Euclid’s Geometry . . . I termed it “the basis of the conceptual appreciation of art” (in a slightly different arrangement of those words), in the introductory defense of it in my A Preliminary Taxonomy of Poetry. I also mentioned “the clarification of discussion that an effective taxonomy can accomplish.” Later, I may have gone off the lyrico-mystical deep end when I said, “At their best, taxonomies (and analysis in general) reveal ever-smaller mysteries, and ever-vaster interconnections to discover down or up to–while allowing us a vocabulary greater than ‘oooh’ and ‘ahhh’ with which to share our pleasure with others.” Granted, the idea that without taxonomy’s help, our vocabulary would be limited to ooohs and ahhhs is absurdly exaggerated. Still, as I hope to show, only a taxonomy-based vocabulary is of maximal usefulness in the search for significant truths.

I soon admitted that I had not done much more than assert the worth of taxonomy, although it still seems to me that anyone who has done serious work in any kind of verosophy (i.e., field of significant material knowledge) would find plenty of support in his experiences for those assertions. Ergo, I now must present a detailed case for taxonomy. Not easy, for that requires a discussion of knowledge, a main contention of mine being that taxonomies are either necessary or hard to do without in all attempts significantly to understand a discipline. Here I ought to stop, for the possibility that I could convince anyone that my understanding of what knowledge is, and how we acquire and use it is valid is less than point oh one percent. Nevertheless, I’ll try. If I can figure out how to.

Warning: I’m now going to think out loud. I will be hard to follow as I will probably jump around. My logic will at times be very lax, and I’ll use coinages of mine unfamiliar to all but me. Don’t expect too much in the way of articulateness, either.

I’m going to start with the knowleplex. That’s what I call the complex of knowlecules (bits of knowledge) that a person’s brain forms when learning his way around a portion of reality containing interrelated matter–one’s neighborhood, for instance, or marine biology, or the study of the photon. There are many kinds of knowleplexes. The most effective, for verosophers, is the verosoplex. That’s because it is systematically organized. Not perfectly, but always aiming for maximal systemization.

I would claim that one reason many plenty dislike taxonomy (and reductive thinking and everything else having to do with science and related fields) is that they are incapable of forming verosoplexes. Some whom I call “milyoops, tend because of their innate temperaments, mainly to form sloppy clumps of knowlecules some of which interrelate with some of the others in the knowleplex but few of which interrelate to all or even a majority of the others in it. The milyooplexes, as I call these, lack a unifying principle, something that makes a big picture possible. An effective taxonomy is the ultimate such unifying principle.

It’s just like a city: an ideal system of streets will get you with maximal efficiency wherever you want to go; streets designed merely to connect one building to one or two others, will be worthless outside a give neighborhood. Similarly, a city with an effective system of streets will tend to fill up with building at eay to find and get-to locations. A really well-organized city (impossible because Nature must make it so) would have a center from which the whole of the center would be in view.

Another kind of knowleplex is the rigidniplex. It’s formed by people I term rigidniks whose innate temperament compels them to create unsound unifying principles–conceptual skeletons, so to speak–that are too inflexible to form a unifying basis for sufficient knowledge to provide a rational understanding of a field. They over-unify too little data.

Milyoops are satisfied by their milyooplexes because they allow pleasurable short-term connections–the pleasure of vaudeville versus the pleasure of a well-written full-length play. Or pop songs versus classical symph0nies. They can’t experience long-term pleasure or be other than bored by anything aimed to provide that, so they oppose it. They love to learn small facts, but avoid systematic knowledge. Another way of putting it is that a milyoop lacks much of an attention span–a pop song’s immediate variation on its initial theme will give them pleasure, but forget a second movement of a symphony’s providing a (probably more complicated) variation on a (probably more complicated) theme played ten minutes previously. They can’t use a taxonomy, which does, basically, what a fine symphony does, so they reject it.

The whole idea is that a small understanding of some small portion of a knowleplex will give pleasure, but if one also can connect it to some other portion of the knowleplex, one can enjoy the second portion at the same time, and if one can also–do to one or more such connections, intuite something of the way everything in the knowleplex interrelate, one can enjoy a truly superior pleasure. Indeed, such an understanding can suggest the sense of the oneness of all things that religions hype as the ultimate happiness–and which I believe all verosophers experience in their best moments, and have spoken of. Artists, too–although not by means of a verosoplex, but by means of (this is a new idea of mine) an intuiplex–a knowleplex whose unifying principle is protoceptual rather than reducticeptual. Or sensual rather than conceptual.

This is a good moment for me. Due to the taxonomical thinking I always do when working with my theory of psychology. I classify artistic temperaments as different from scientific temperaments on the basis of their brain make-up, which I won’t go into here. And suddenly perceived how I could be nice to artists with this intuiplex, which I genuinely see can be a route to large truths equal to the verosoplex. But also what causes the two cultures C. P. Snow wrote about, and which I fully accept.

The intuiplex much more than the verosoplex aids the pursuit of beauty, which I hold to be as important as the search for truth, but probably hinders the latter–except when used by someone who also is capable of verosoplexes. Similarly, verosoplexes tend to get in the way of the pursuit and appreciation of beauty.

Again, I yield to the temptation of using my present reasoning to support the value of taxonomy. Only because of taxonomy have I been able on the spur of the moment to hypothesize an intuiplex–because it is based on the knowleplex, which is only a taxonomical level one step above it, and the verosoplex, which it is recognizably identical to (to me) except for one thing, its being an arrangement of primarily protoceptual knowlecules (think of the somatic knowledge that some highly unintellectual highly effective athletes have) instead of reducticeptual knowlecules–which, by the way, is taxonomically very similar, and in the same taxon as protoceptual knowlecules, differing from them only in that their ultimate source is the data conveyed to the brain more or less directly from the senses rather than extracted from the senses pre-cerebralling and converted to reducticepts (or conceptual knowledge, like words, numbers or geometrical shapes).

An important point to recognize is that the validity of my theory of psychology is irrelevant so far as the value of its taxonomy is concerned: its taxonomy greatly facilitates my navigation of it, and ability to understand it–and find gaps worth trying to fill I’d never find without it,

I really think I know what I’m talking about, however little it may seem so. I hope someone somewhere in time and space gets something out of this installment of my adventure in Advanced Thought. More, I hope, tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 17th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Grumman coinage, Knowlecular Psychology, Taxonomy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Entry 346 — The Definition of Visual Poetry, Yet Again « POETICKS

Entry 346 — The Definition of Visual Poetry, Yet Again

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 13th, 2011 at 5:17 PM and is filed under Knowlecular Psychology, Poetics, Taxonomy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

9 Responses to “Entry 346 — The Definition of Visual Poetry, Yet Again”

karl kempton says:

14 January 11 at 5:51 AM

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.
Bob Grumman says:

14 January 11 at 11:38 AM

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.
serkan isin says:

14 January 11 at 11:42 AM

‘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.
Bob Grumman says:

14 January 11 at 12:05 PM

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.
serkan isin says:

14 January 11 at 2:31 PM

@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)?
Bob Grumman says:

14 January 11 at 3:47 PM

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?
nico says:

15 January 11 at 2:14 AM

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.
huseyin kaya says:

15 January 11 at 1:46 PM

karl kempton sevişelim mi?
Ki Sastro Molotov says:

22 January 11 at 12:23 PM

Concrete poem represents deep feeling

Entry 1083 — More Mathpo Blither « POETICKS

Entry 1083 — More Mathpo Blither

I believe I’ve worked out my final argument for considering mathematical operations to happen in my mathexpressive poems:

(1) Consider the sentence, “It is the east and Juliet is the sun.” The sun is presented as a metaphor for Juliet but it remains an actual sun.

(2) Consider the equation, “(meadow)(April) = flowers.” The mathematical operation of multiplication is presented as a metaphor for the way April operates on a meadow, but it remains an actual mathematical operation of multiplication. The equation carries out the operation of multiplication on two non-mathematical terms to get a third non-mathematical term. It is something real that acts metaphorically.

If the mathematical operation does not occur, what happens? Two images, one of a meadow, one of April, whose collocation a reader is to take as having to do with flowers? What sort of poem would that be? Not that the actual mathematical operation makes it a great poem; I only use it because its simplicity makes my point so clearly.

That it is possible for such a thing as a poem that is part mathematical and part verbal to exist is important to me for taxonomical reasons since it helps substantially to allow me to claim all poetry ultimately to be of just two main kinds, lexexpressive poetry, which consists of nothing (or, sometimes, nearly nothing) but words (and punctuation marks), and plurexpressive poetry, in which one or more expressive modality is as aesthetically important in it as words (and punctuation marks): visioexpressive poetry, mathexpressive poetry, audioexpressive poetry and performance poetry (which I want to find a term for that carries on my “X-expressive” coining).

Turn Around Points

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Mathematical Poetry, Poetics, Taxonomy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Category: Taxonomy