Mad Poet Symposium, Part One

Small Press Review,
Volume 34, Numbers 9/10, August/September 2002

An American Avant Garde: Second Wave, An Exhibit
John M. Bennett and Geoffrey D. Smith, Curators.
80 pp; 2002; Pa;
Rare Books & Manuscripts Library,
The Ohio State University Libraries
1858 Neil Av Mall, Columbus, OH 43210. $15.

An American Avant Garde: First Wave:
An Exhibit Featuring the William S. Burroughs Collection
and Work by Other Avant-Garde Artists
John M. Bennett and Geoffrey D. Smith, Curators
48 pp; 2001; Pa;
Rare Books & Manuscripts Library,
The Ohio State University Libraries
1858 Neil Av Mall, Columbus, OH 43210. $15.

It began with an afternoon open mike poetry reading on Friday, 26 September 2002, in one of the rooms in the main library at Ohio State. I was pretty out of it–a 30-hour trip on a

Greyhound bus can do that to you, and it was little more than an hour behind me. I recognized the first reader, though–Mike Basinski. He was grunting and howling–with a big smile. According to Dave Baratrier, who posted an impression of the proceedings to an Internet poetry discussion group (and kindly put me up the two days I was in town), Mike’s poem involved “all kinds of packing materials.” I remember things being thrown into the audience, I think, but it’s now hazy. I should have taken notes, but didn’t. I do know that ten or fifteen poets besides Mike eventually read something. Most hesitated to do so until it looked necessary, no one else seeming to want to. I hesitated near- maximally, myself. I had come thinking I would read something but got spooked by how far out the material being presented was. The poem I’d chosen for the occasion was text- only. It was purposely agrammatical at a few points, and used a number of portmanteau Joyceanisms but did not seem very unconventional. The ones who read seemed awfully good, too–and polished. So I quickly got the worse case of stage fright I’ve ever had. I even started feeling ill. That saved me, though, for it made me angry enough at myself to decide I had to read to prove I could. So I pushed myself up and did okay.

Among the other readers were mIEKAL aND, Peter Ganick, Lewis LaCook, Andrew Topel, Tom Taylor, Michael Peters, William Austin, Dave Baratrier, and Igor Satanovsky (who used a bullhorn for what he read, which included a hilarious harangue against “ski’s” or “sky’s” we could do without–like Stravinski, Kandinsky and . . . Basinski).

After the reading came an hour or two of visiting, and snacking on the excellent food provided, though I now forget what it was. Then, John M. Bennett, main organizer of the event, led us out of the building and across a few lawns to the Grand Lounge of the OSU Faculty Club. There we heard Marvin Sackner’s keynote address, which turned out to be a presentation using Powerpoint (a computer program for presenting computer images as though they were slides). He was very entertaining about his collecting activities, showing some of the works in his archive as he discussed them. Then he presented a survey mostly of work he owns by presenters. It took him worrisomely long to get to something by Me, but he made up for that at last by showing three pieces of mine! Among them was a visual haiku about a boy on a “s.wing.” This, he noted, was from 1966, which indicated how long I’d been doing visual poetry. After his speech, when we happened to be leaving at the same time, I thanked him for saying how long I’d been doing visual poetry, meaning I was pleased to be thought someone there in “the early days.” He took me to be jokingly annoyed with him letting out how ancient I was, so I’ve decided now that that was how I intended it.

So ended the events of day one of the two-day symposium put on by the Ohio State University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library as part of its An American Avant Garde: Second Wave, An Exhibit, which was at the library from 20 June through 3 September. I’ll be writing more about the symposium in my next few SPR columns, for I believe it, and the exhibit it was part of, were Of Signal Importance To American Culture. The catalogue that was published for the exhibit was a wow, too, and I expect to spend at least one full column on it. It, and the catalogue for the exhibit that preceded it last year, are well worth the money asked for them.

Note: to see pix of participants in the symposium, and some neato photographic impressions of the exhibit by Thomas Taylor, go here.

So far in this section is a discussion by Joey Engelhart of my mathemaku.

A One-Zine library of Visual Poetry

Small Press Review,
Volume 30, Number 5/6, May/June 1998

Xerolage, Numbers 1, 25 and 26,
Winter 1985, Fall 1997 and Winter 1998; 24 pp., each;
Xexoxial Editions, Route 1, Box 131,
LaFarge WI 54639. $4.50 ppd., each.

QUERY, QUEST, & QUASI, by Marilyn R. Rosenberg.
Winter 1998; 24 pp; M. Rosenberg,
67 Lakeview Ave., West, Peeksill NY 10566. $10 ppd.

DiMichele’s work, in my terminology, is visiocollagic poetry, which is to say that its verbal and visual elements are separate on the page but blend in the mind as opposed to the verbal and visual elements of visualloyic poetry, which are merged on paper as well as in the mind. Throughout DiMichele’s still-not-out-of- date romp through the possibilities of poetry are micro-triumphs like the combo “briarsand brains” (sic), “molybdenum of the nightingales,” and “pain and space.” Most of his graphic images are from iconophilic religions and mysticism. Do-re-mi charts of consciousness development (or whatever they are) occur–in about the only crisp print in the generally misty/mysticky sequence. On the next-to-last page, “of purpose making” is printed with “purpos” upside-down, “em” sideways and going up from “purpos”– and turning into “aking,” with “of” sideways and going down just right of “em.” The letters of this text are blown up to about quadruple normal type size, and parts of them are missing. The “r” and “u” of “purpos” are joined to give the upside version of it a shape recalling both “sound” and “sodium,” while the “po” of “purpos” continues naturally into “em,” the “s” moving a little past the line “em” is on. Then there’s “aking” as “aching” and as “a king.” “Sodium” might seem a little out of left field here, but to me it suggests salt, which I deem a major secondary element of human existence, behind the primaries, fire, water, earth and air. The main text on the last page says, “sing, perplexing and bewildering to an honest”–and there it stops.

In the visiocollagic poetry sequence Rosenberg has composed for Xerolage 25, she treats double-pages as the windshield of a car traveling through her life. Teeming with letters, words, drawings, occasional photographs, each page seems a summary of the possibilities of visio-textual art. Here are just a couple of the surface highpoints: the word “SILENCE”, large and in outline (i.e., nearly invisible), spent two letters at a time on the last four spreads save one, which is dominated by stop signs and the word “STOP,” and, amusingly, “STOPPAGE”; the first page’s “ST” towering above the word, “ART,” and soon making “STEP” and “STORY”–and, among other things, setting up the final ST-pages; a great ink&wash drawing of a fire hydrant; the footnoted relationship of “SHOUT” to “south” . . .

Incidentally, Rosenberg has recently put together a new artist’s book, QUERY, QUEST, & QUASI that I think worth publicizing. As a limited-edition collector’s item, it is a bargain at ten bucks. Here’s what I wrote Marilyn after receiving a copy of her book three days before my birthday (give or take a phrase or two): “Your mousefully delightful book picked a great time to get here. I have no brilliant first thoughts about it. I just like the design & (as always) the words within words (e.g., “sUPpose” . . . “supPOSE”), none of them ever not elegantly wedded to the overall thrust of the work. So many narratives to fun around in, the main one being–I take it–human querying, investigation, sniffing through existence like mice [several masterful drawings of which Rosenberg has scattered through the book]–but lots more.”

Steve McComas’s contribution to the Xerolage series, The Book of not Seeing Things, consists mainly of visual collages–but with enough texts mixed in for me to call it (barely) visiocollagic poetry. Close to its beginning it is actually visualloyic, for its second page consists chiefly of the large-lettered text, “GENE/ SEES” (a play on “genesis”/”geneses” and, illumagistically, symmetry and near-symmetry). On the page before an Assyrian-looking ancient holds a giant cut-away schematic of the human eye on one shoulder. The following label runs down his front to indicate the tone of much of McComas’s sequence: “i, atlas, never shirk or wear a shirt or jockstrap. i, atlas, supporter of lost causes. i, atlas, bearer of a new vision.” McComas takes a few comic swipes at the Bible, too, reproducing passages from “The Book of Genesis” with key repeated words replaced with amusingly inappropriate/appropriate ones, in an enlarged typeface of a wrong-looking style: e.g., “garden” three times becomes “DETAINMENT FACILITY”–as in “Therefore Lord God sent them forth from the DETAINMENT FACILITY of Eden.”

But as he wryly explores the nature of seeing and not seeing (with, for example, a series of pictures of various “texts”–such as Tarot card-faces, traffic signs, Indian sign language, bee- signals–crossing the page from a mouth to an ear), McComas is as thoughtful as he is comic, even occasionally approaching lyricism. I was particularly taken with one simple, precise but highly abstract outline of (perhaps) a Chinese temple with three tilted black lines that looked to have been finger-painted above the temple that made me think of Chinese ideograms (or the beginnings of writing) ascending from (and referring back to) the sacred. In short, The Book of not Seeing Things is multi- faceted and deep–as are just about all the specimens in the Xerolage project.

For well over a decade Xerolage has been giving one-man shows (on 8.5″ by 11″ pages) to top-notch visio-textual artists including, now, Steve McComas and Marilyn R. Rosenberg. The series began with a collection of work by Bill DiMichele, (Above) At The Meeting Of White Witches, which DiMichele describes in his introduction as “A study of the four-dimensional face of Humanity, a conjuring of higher functions, a practical monomyth, Gurdjieff-Ouspensky influenced, told in a Xerolage style.”

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Artist’s Statement

Comment on this poem in particular from Visiotextual Selectricity, 2008, an anthology containing Koppány’s poem:  “My intention was to write in light on the dusty canvas of sky a word which is illuminated by the small four quotation “lamps” — but also hidden by their unusual arrangement.  It is about the paradoxical nature of evocation.  The other dedicatee, in parentheses, is my late father who Hungarized his name before I was born.  I was tinkering (again) with the Cordelia-motive (an old fixation).  First came “‘aside’, but it was too descriptive; then “‘ash’, with my own family’s idea, but it was too direct; finally I found “‘dust’, which brought in my mind a close friend and his stance in poetry.”

Begun on 5 February 2011

Grumguage GRUM gwidj: words and phrases created (or redefined) by Bob Grumman in the arrogant belief that the glorious English language is insufficent for the kind of incredibly full-scale understanding of each of the many significant fields of knowledge that Grumman has achieved in spite of the mediocrities and submediocrities in (mostly unconscious) opposition to him

Subjective Maxolute Reality (that reality whose existence comes closest absolute certainty): my mind plus all that it can directly experience through my body’s sensors.

Subjective Probsolute Reality (that reality that exists beyond reasonable doubt): the constituents of maxolute reality according to logic (pure rationality), and is not contradicted by anything I know about maxolute reality.  It is not necessary for it to parallel what I know to be maxolutely real, but it helps.  Others’ minds, for instance.

Objective Maxolute Reality: That portion of my maxolute reality that (I believe) a majority of others accept as maxolute reality.

Objective Probsolute Reality: That portion of my probsolute reality that (I believe) those (I consider) knowledgeable about the portion involved agree with me about.

Metaphysical Reality: Anything outside the above realities; fun to think about, but irrelevant

The Otherstream 19 Years Ago, Part 3

Small Press Review,
Volume 44, Numbers 9/10 September/October 2012

Poeticks.com, Webmaster: Bob Grumman http://www.poeticks.com/bob-grummans-small-press-review-columns/june-1993

My fifth column (March 1994) for Small Press Review (actually it was for Small Magazine Review, which for a short time was separate from SPR) concerned a Small Press Review guest editorial of mine that had appeared a year before in SPR about the number of different “schools” of poetry then extant in America.  I listed some, then invited others to send me names of schools I’d missed.  Two others wrote me complimentary, encouraging letters–but no names of schools.  My column was a rant about the situation (which continues).  Here’s one paragraph from it:

“That’s about it. Dana Gioia, on the other hand, got so many responses to the Atlantic article he wrote a year or two ago on the state of American poetry that he can’t even begin to reply to them, or so he claims. Since Gioia’s appreciation of poetry stops at around 1900, and even his academic knowledge of it is only up to 1960, I conclude from the opposite receptions given our articles even taking into consideration the relatively large circulation of the Atlantic) that the poetry community in America has almost no interest in poetry, or even mere discussion of poetry, that uses techniques not common by the fifties or earlier.”

Eighteen years ago, and the situation hasn’t changed!  To illustrate it back then, I turned to an issue of Poetry USA just out which was devoted to just about the entire spectrum of contemporary American poetry.  About Mike Basinski’s, “Odalisque No. 4,” I told how he circles an O with twenty words containing a v–or V, many of them not normally spelled with v’s–”vords,” for instance. This would undoubtedly seem a silly game to Gioia and his Atlantic readers, but for me it was (yes) thrilling to experience a ‘down’ sharpened to ‘dovn,’ a ‘water’ turned Germanic and fatherly as ‘vater,’ and such unmodified words as ‘wives’ and ‘aggressive’ as suddenly alien objects, speared into or downward.  Or, best of all, to find between ‘wildevness’ and ‘festival,’ and opposite “wives,” the wonderfully expanded ‘luVst.’”  (See my blog, entry 7.)  Then I lamented that slickzines like the Atlantic would no doubt “continue forever to ignore publications like Poetry USA,” as, of course, they have.

In my next column, I spent some time on Richard Kostelanetz’s Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes–because he had an entry in it on me–as “a major critic of avant-garde American poetry,”  no less!  So far as I know, Kostelanetz’s dictionary failed to make much of a splash, but Schirmers around ten years later published a much fancier edition of it (that I contributed several entries to), which was an advance of sorts.  I wrote some editor of a new edition-in-progress of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics recommending he check it for data available nowhere else.  He didn’t write back.  Their edition has just hit the market.  I’m curious to find out if it covers any aspect of poetry discussed in Kostelanetz’s encyclopedia.  Visual poetry, yes, for it has covered it (poorly) in previous editions.  Infraverbal Poetry, perhaps, although not by that name.  Mathematical poetry.  No way on earth.

I went on from Kostelanetz’s encyclopedia to another work just out then by him, WORDWORKS.  I complained about its not yet having been reviewed in either the academic or the popular media, despite its being a landmark collection of Kostelanetz’s most clearly major works and part of a series that includes collections by such certified poets as John Logan, William Stafford, W.D. Snodgrass and Carolyn Kizer.  I think I may be the only one even now who has reviewed WORDWORKS.  Nor has anyone, to my knowledge, written a book-length critique of all his work yet.  Which is disgusting.  Even more disgusting is the fact that, so far as I know, no such book has been published about any genuinely otherstream poet.  I’m too poor myself to take on such a project with no chance to make anything from it–WHERE’S MY PATRON?!?!

After abandoning Richard without the 70,000-word treatment his work deserves, I discussed three otherstream microzines of the time, Texture (language poetry plus a commentary on Gertrude Stein by Julia Spahr that didn’t work for me), The Imploding Tie-Dyed Toupee (which I described as having “a wide selection of collages, and visual and electrojunctive poems–what the latter are I now have no idea), and Grist On-Line, the first online zine I’d come across with otherstream material (poems by Andrew Gettler and Jurado, neither of whom I’ve seen work by since–but Grist is still online).  Its editor, John Fowler, set up an electronic poetry bookstore, I see from my column.  I had books at it, happy to get in on the ground floor of such an enterprise.  Nothing whatever came of that, needless to say.

My columns for the next two issues of  SPR had to do with work at what I then considered “the Literary Cutting-Edge.”  Alas, except for interesting computer- and Internet-related poetry, it remains the literary cutting-edge.  I tackled two issues of Peter Ganick’s microzine, A.bacus, in one column and an anthology Peter’s press published, The Art of Practice in the other.  Amusingly, the poetry in these was mostly by the langpo crowd that my vispo crowd–most of it, anyway, including me–was on bad terms with, but I not only gave my best critical attention to it, but was positive about it!  I do believe I can be objective as a critic, and focus on whatever poem I’m analyzing, putting aside petty rivalries.  And I didn’t actively dislike anyone in the vispo crowd, just wasn’t happy about the way some of them left us out of shows and anthologies they might have included us in, as we included them in ours at times, and–more important–failed to write about us, even as little as I wrote about them.

Anyway, in my encounter with the issues of A.bacus and the anthology, I did what I considered (and still consider) cutting-edge explications of poems I considered genuine language poetry.  Not now though, for I’ve come to the end of what I consider my allotment of column-space.
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Yahoo Dating Personals

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The Latest Visiotextual Art Anthology

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Small Press Review,
Volume 45, Numbers 3/4 March/April 2013

the last VISPO anthology: visual poetry 1998 – 2008
Editors: Crag Hill & Nico Vassilakis.  331pp; 2012;  Pa;
Fantagraphics Books,
7563 Lake City Way NE, Seattle WA 98115. $40.
www.fantagraphics.com

Toward the end of 2012 Fantagraphics, a well-known mainstream publisher of full-color, beautifully-reproduced graphic novels and the like, came out with the last VISPO anthology: visual poetry 1998 – 2008, marking the first time to my knowledge so commercial a press was responsible for anything having to do with visual poetry.

The anthology is divided into five (not very helpfully-labeled) sections, each with a group of three to six essays to the fore: “Lettering,” “Object,” “Handwritten,” “Typography,” and “Collage.”  Boasting 148 contributors from 43 countries, it is clearly intended to display the full range of recent visio-textual art (from 1998 to 2008, according to its title) rather than highlight the best such art from that period.

When I dipped into the first section, “lettering,” which consists almost entirely of textual designs employing mostly distorted letters, I found very few I could say much about.  Take Daniel f. Bradley’s “White Witch 10,” which consists of white letters of varied sizes and fonts scattered across fragments of black rectangles in a small patch way up at the top of an otherwise empty page.  A witch’s effect on language, a white witch’s?  The hint of the magic for good or evil of language is nice, and the design itself seems masterful to me.  That I can’t say much about it is not its fault.  But . . .

Perhaps my favorites in this section (except for two visual haiku by Scott Helmes whose work I’m always plugging so will say no more about here) are two side-by-side wonderfully colored scatterings of letters by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen that seem views into the living inhabitants of the microscopic realm from which language originates.

In the next section, “Objects,” I began noticing the excellence of the editors’ choice of pairings, and longer sequences of images: for instance, on  pair of pages here Chris Joseph’s “Hair” on the left, and Michael Basinski’s “ZERZOUR” flow gracefully from one to the other, both centering on a female face, both warm with flesh tones.  Each has verbal content, too.  In “Hair” it is fused both visually and conceptually with the piece’s image of a woman’s face, one of its words being, “ringlet,” for instance, another “blonde.” The words in “ZERZOUR” are employed mainly as discrete visual elements in the collage the piece is, thus presenting chances for the discovery of unexpected interconnections–or interdisconnections–making it harder to get to the poem they and the visual elements eventually cohere into than it is to reach the poem “Hair” quickly becomes.  The poem “ZERZOUR” becomes will also vary much more from reader to reader than the one “Hair” becomes.

I can’t leave “Object” without mentioning one of the real objects by K.S. Ernst in it: a sculpture in which wooden letters spell “VIOLET” downward (in violet)–with a red N  jammed like a shelf between the word’s E and T: the verbal and visual as one, and wonderfully expressive.

The “Handwritten” section consists mostly but not entirely of hand-written pieces, two of which I especially like on facing pages, Robert Grenier’s “AFTER/NOON/SUN/SHINE” and “RED W/OOOD/RED/WOODS”  (with the extra O intentional).  Each consists of large skinny printed letters spelling its text in red, green, blue and black ink in what you might guess was a homeless person’s calligraphy–very crude-seeming–but carrying (it seems to me) all the visual charge and fun of the asemic art it resembles plus a haiku-deep semantic resonance–rising from a firmly denotational archetypal basis.

John M. Bennett has two works in this section that similarly, and differently, demonstrate the way words and graphics can combine in paths into the importantly new out of the importantly old of the concrete poetry of fifty or sixty years ago.

Skipping around a bit, I opened the “Typography” section by chance to Karl Jurgens’s amusing “For bp” (bp being the famous Canadian visual poet, bp Nichol).  It consists of two rectangular layers of bp’s, one superimposed on the other, with blank in the shape of a huge H left in the middle. Included in its title is the information that no H’s were harmed in its production.

In the final “collage” section, Two pieces in particular caught my eye, one called “Florescent Hunting Knives” by Andrew Abbott and, next to it, E y, by Alberto Vitacchio, even though I found both of them verbally hermetic.  Intriguing shapes and colors. Abbott’s seems some kind of manmade block extending into a waste land, or waste sea.  On it is what may be a mailbox with four newspaper clippings pasted on it bearing the message, “WELCOME ASSORTED FLUORESCENT HUNTING KNIVES.”

The background of Vitacchio’s piece seems to me either a sky with wispy clouds over some kind of greenery, or a portion of a lily pad on a pond with some kind of white scum on it.  Two vertical strips take up most of the piece’s middle, one labeled at the top, “E,” the other labeled at the bottom, “y.”  Green vines connect them.  I like them both, but fail to see the point of calling them visual poetry–i.e., I can’t read them.

I understand that several mainstream big city bookstores are carrying the anthology.  One disappointment is that no reviews, to speak of, even as short as this one, appeared in the first three months or so that it’s been out.  Nor has it made any list of “notable books of 2012.”  But it compares favorably with the two great concrete poetry anthologies of 40 or so years ago, edited by Mary Ellen Solt and Emmett Williams.  No one with any interest in art combining text and graphics should be without it.

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air conditioners

FRANCIS BACON

The strength of the arguments for Shakespeare, and the weakness of the arguments against him have done little to discourage anti-Stratfordians from putting forward droves of different candidates for the title of True Author. The main ones at this writing are Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, Christopher Marlowe and William Stanley.

The most venerable authorship campaign has been the one carried out on behalf of Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Bacon was a born aristocrat, successful politician, and widely-admired philosopher and man of letters—the only man of the times who was capable of producing such great works as Shakespeare’s. Or so his backers imagine. The first argument in support of Bacon is based on a looneation, the fact that we have no report of Shakespeare’s ever meeting Bacon, nor any mention of him together with Bacon in the same text. For the perceptive, this oddity can only be explained by Bacon’s being Shakespeare. (No chance that no one would any more think of putting an entertainer like Shakespeare with a government man like Bacon back then than anybody would today couple singer Eminem and one-time US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.)

In January 1592 Bacon wrote his uncle, Lord Burghley, “I have taken all knowledge to be my province.” His life’s work was a project he called “the Great Instauration,” the regeneration of learning, based on scientific reasoning. Psychology was to be one of his topics. Its lessons, he wrote, should be taught through “visible representations” and through “actual types and models, by which the entire process of the mind should be set as it were before the eyes.” To Baconians, this could mean only one thing: that he planned to employ plays to set forth his psychology. Practically proving that is the fact that, except for discussions of various historical figures and comments on human behavior in his essays and other writings, we have no work of psychology from him—in his name.

Considering the horror of an important aristocrat’s being caught writing for the public stage, and how incapable any secret True Author would be of thinking to write novels or closet plays or plays for the court only instead, he must therefore have used Shakespeare as a front, or used his name as a pseudonym not realizing it belonged to someone else in the theatre.

The anti-Stratfordian, John Michell, admits that there are flaws in the supposition that Bacon wrote The Oeuvre. (Michell is very even-handed, always pointing out an equal number of flaws in each candidate’s case, including Shakespeare’s; he never points out, however, that in doing this, he covers all the “flaws” in Shakespeare’s case, but less than ten percent of the genuine flaws in any other candidate’s.) “There are some items in the list of Shakespeare’s alleged attributes that cannot easily be explained by the hypothesis of Bacon’s authorship,” says he. “Francis Bacon was no professional mariner, nor was he a soldier, and Shakespeare’s apparently first-hand descriptions of hunting and the sports and pastimes of the nobility seem rather too robust for someone with Bacon’s delicate health and studious habits. There is nothing to show that Bacon had the experience of Denmark which some have attributed to the author of Hamlet, nor is he known to have traveled in Italy. These are among the weak points in the case for Bacon as the sole author of Shakespeare. Despite their similarities, the two writers are still not perfectly matched.”

On the other hand: “Bacon and the author of Shakespeare both had the same classically learned, legally attuned cast of mind. Both were conservative traditionalists, supporters of lawful authority and a hierarchically ordered realm. Both writers were linguistically inventive, commanding a wide vocabulary and coining new words and expressions. They each quoted from the same literary sources, often in paraphrase or with slight inaccuracies, as if drawing from learned mnemones rather than looking up references. They had an equal tendency towards secretiveness and were interested in subterfuges, disguises and hidden communications. There are many examples of these in Shakespeare’s plays, while Bacon’s addiction to ciphers and coded messages is only too well known to those who have lost themselves in the quest for a cipher in Shakespeare. Finally, both Bacon and, on the evidence of his Sonnets, Shakespeare were lovers of young men.”

Even if all this were true, so what? That such similarities should be enough to overcome all all the hard evidence for Shakespeare is absurd. But it’s moot, because:

(1) Shakespeare the author was not classically learned, nor his mind any more legally attuned than the minds of the others writing plays at the time.

(2) The majority of those in the middle and upper classes supported lawful authority and a hierarchically ordered realm, so Bacon’s resembling Shakespeare in this means nothing.

(3) Many writers of the time (Nashe, for instance, and Harvey) were linguistically inventive, so both Bacon’s and Shakespeare’s being so is another so what.

(4) There is no evidence that Shakespeare had any “tendency towards secretiveness and (was) interested in subterfuges, disguises (including the cross-dressing practically obligatory with all-male casts, one would think) and hidden communications” outside the plot-energizing fun he had with them in his comedies, as have the majority of writers of comedies before and since, so he cannot be considered necessarily similar to Bacon in this respect.

(5) As for both Bacon and Shakespeare’s sexual preferences, there seems to be good evidence that Bacon was homosexual, but little or none that Shakespeare was. The only direct testimony about the latter that we have is Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 20,” in which Shakespeare explicitly denies any homosexual interest in the young man so many of his sonnets were addressed to.

Of course, all the orthodox authorities on either Bacon or Shakespeare have denied their identity on stylistic grounds alone. Baconians argue, with some plausibility, that if Bacon wrote poetry, its style would have differed from the style of his prose, and might well have sounded Shakespearean. They have no direct concrete evidence that he did write poetry, other than some nondescript verse translations of the Psalms he wrote toward the end of his life. Aubrey, however, speculated that he was “a good Poet, but conceal’d”–apparently because Bacon spoke of himself in a letter as a concealed poet. But he wrote it to a known poet, in such a way as to indicate that he was merely an unpublished poet since he took it for granted that his correspondent knew of his “concealed poetry.” Moreover, in a work about the Essex affair, Bacon later said he’d written a sonnet to Queen Elizabeth in hopes it’d reconcile her to Essex–adding, “Although I profess not to be a poet.” To authorship cranks, “I profess not,” would mean “I pretend not”; to the rest of us, it would mean, “poetry is a minor sideline for me.”

Proof that the diligent overturner-of-received-wisdom can always find evidence to support his delusions is the discovery by other Baconians of a hint of Bacon’s literary pseudonymity in a letter from the continent
that Bacon’s friend, Sir Tobie Matthew, wrote him. In a postscript to the letter, Matthew said, “The most prodigious wit that ever I knew of my nation, and of this side of the sea, is of your Lordship’s name, though he be known by another.” Sidney Lee surmised that Thomas Southwell, living in Liege at the time, and a son of a man named Bacon, was meant, which makes sense. What does not make sense is the way the Baconians have taken Matthew, which is that he was referring to Francis or his brother (another authorship candidate)–revealing to him as a fact that might interest him that, hey, someone with your name (yourself—or your brother Roger) although he goes by another, is the brightest Englishman on this side of the sea. Preposterous, even if either of the Bacons was a resident on the continent.

Then there’s Durning-Lawrence. He managed to turn a 1645 anonymous work, The Great Assises holden in Parnassus by Apollo and his Assessours, into evidence that Bacon was a poet because it names him (in a spoof trial) as “Chancellor of Parnassus,” which would make him a leading poet. Unfortunately, in the same text, Shakespeare is mentioned, as well, which suggests that even if Bacon was a secret poet, he was not Shakespeare.

There’s also Jonson, who in his The Poetaster includes a character, Ovid, Jr., who is supposed by Baconians to be based on Bacon-as-Shakespeare (Jonson, of course, being privy to The Truth but not above telling everyone about it through a satire). Ovid, Jr., is depicted translating a passage from Ovid that contains a couplet that Shakespeare put on the title-page of his Venus and Adonis. Ovid, Sr., finding Ovid, Jr., doing this, accuses him of writing a tragedy, Medea, for the common players, which Ovid, Jr., denies. Odd that Jonson would openly refer to Venus and Adonis’s title-page but then not find a play-title more like something actually written by Shakespeare for his satirical purposes. Once again, unbelievably flimsy speculation is all Bacon’s supporters can come up with in support of his candidacy.

But Michell brings in something better, he thinks: “a contemporary painting of a well-known Shakespearian scene” in an old inn, “the fourteenth-century White Hart Hotel on Holywell Hill (which) was in Bacon’s time the nearest inn to his mansion at Gorhambury, two miles away.” So, a painting about a subject Shakespeare used in a narrative poem, which was popular (“a common renaissance theme,” as one scholar put it) before he used it, and more popular after he used it, in an inn near where Bacon lived, is supposed to be more than a trivial coincidence. I don’t buy it. Even though, according to Michell, St. Albans, where Bacon lived, is named fifteen times in The Oeuvre, Stratford-upon-Avon, not once. Of course, St. Albans was somewhat more relevant to the military history of England than Stratford, but that means nothing to Baconians. I will say that I’ve written more than ten plays, myself, and not one of them mentions my hometown.

Next on the list of “evidence” for Bacon is Joseph Hall’s Satires (1599), which criticizes a writer Hall calls Labeo, a name with—steady, now—b, a and o, just like “Bacon!” What’s more, Labeo is a lawyer, like Bacon. Strained interpretation of Hall’s work can make it suggest that there are people pretending to be poets about, and that Shakespeare may be involved (due to a possible reference to the same Ovid poem the epigraph on the title-page of Venus and Adonis is from). A year later, in a continuation of his Satires, Hall writes of “the craftie cuttle (who) lieth sure/ In the black Cloud of his thick vomiture,” going on to ask, “Who list complaine of wronged faith or fame/ When he may shift it to anothers name?” To me, Hall is speaking of shifting blame to another; to a Baconian, he is speaking of shifting the writings others complain of (as beneath the dignity of a courtier, I imagine) to another author.

One Major Clue in the poem is a mention of a helmet, which is “a reference to the ‘Honourable Order of the Knights of the Helmet’ described in Bacon’s Gesta Greyorum, produced at Gray’s Inn in 1594, and thus pointing to him as the author of Venus and Adonis”–at least in the mind of Baconian Bertram Theobald, writing in 1932.

To follow up on this, we have to go first to the appendix of John Marston’s poem, Pigmalions Image (1598), which says, “So Labeo did complain his love was stone,/ Obdurate, flinty, so relentless none;/ Yet Lynceus knows that in the end of this/ He wrought as strange a metamorphosis.” Michell points out the parallel of the first two lines of this to lines spoken in Venus and Adonis by Venus to Adonis, “Art thou obdurate, flinty hard as steel/ Nay, more than flint, for stone at rain relenteth?” The other two lines refer to Adonis’s being transformed into a flower. To a sane person, all this shows is that Marston was (perhaps) influenced by a popular poem of the time, and/or using conventional language current in poetry then. To Baconians, he is practically screaming that he is using Venus and Adonis to alert us to the identity of The True Author as Labeo/Bacon.

To “prove” this, Michell brings in one of Marston’s Satires, number 4, entitled “Redactio.” There “Labeo is specifically identified in a line which Marston addresses to Hall: ‘What, not mediocria firma from thy spite?’ Mediocria firma (implying, ‘Hold fast to the middle course!’) was Francis Bacon’s family motto, belonging only to himself and his brother Anthony. So this is the conclusion: Francis Bacon was Labeo, Labeo was the author of Venus and Adonis, and Bacon was therefore responsible for at least some of the writings attributed to Shakespeare.”

Michell has found H. N. Gibson, a befuddled Shakespearean scholar who goes along with this crap, but comes to the rescue of the Bard by pointing out that Marston and Hall, thought Bacon the author of Venus and Adonis by mistake. I can’t see that, since the name of its author was on Venus and Adonis. I would say that we have very little reason to believe that Marston and Hall thought Labeo the author of Venus and Adonis, and that one use of a conventional Latin phrase that was the Bacon family motto is a long way from plausibly demonstrating that Labeo was Bacon.  Even if Labeo was intended to satirize Bacon, there’s no reasonable connection from that to the authorship of Venus and Adonis.  I suppose I have to go along with Gibson, though, in considering the Labeo matter the best evidence extant for Bacon. Which is saying nearly nothing at all.

One last bit of “hard” evidence for Bacon is the Northumberland Manuscript, a damaged and now-incomplete collection of writings discovered in 1867 that Michell says “seems to have come from the office of Francis Bacon.” It has a contents page that mentions both Bacon and Shakespeare—and Thomas Nashe—that obviously means that work by these three was initially in the manuscript. Baconians, however, find the sequence, “By mr ffrauncis Bacon/ Essaies by the same author/ William Shakespeare” followed by the names of two of Shakespeare’s histories, evidence that Bacon was Shakespeare, and that whoever wrote the sequence made a point of distinguishing the stuff in the collection that Bacon wrote under his own name from that which he wrote under Shakespeare’s—and, in case he forgot, I suppose, made sure to indicate that Shakespeare was the same author as Bacon. Even Michell doesn’t seem to take this too seriously.

The most notorious “evidence” for Bacon is cryptographic. For decades, fanatics have scoured Shakespeare’s and related works (including paintings, engravings, and the like) for secret messages, most of them finding nothing anyone but a few of their craziest followers also see. None of these escape William F. and Elizebeth S. Friedman’s demolition of all such ciphers and word-games past, present and to-be in their The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined. The thoroughness of the Friedmans’ work makes my bothering with the message-finders here unnecessary—though I will in due course critique a secret message found by one believing that Marlowe was the True Author, or something close to it. The reader will have to take my word that this secret message is the best of the crop, and that I could similarly dispose of any others, assuming the Friedmans hadn’t already done so. I might add that most recent anti-Stratfordians do their best to keep distance between themselves and the message-finders, for even they tend to agree with Orthodoxy about their nuttiness. Michell, as sympathetic to idiocy as any of them, is compelled to admit that while he thinks there are good reasons to believe in Baconianism, “the Baconian symbolists and cryptologists have done little to help it.”

Baconians, of course, like all anti-Stratfordians, can find references of every possible description to their man and events in his life in The Oeuvre. One such reference is Mistress Quickly, a servant-girl, inserting the following joke into a Latin lesson being given to the boy William in The Merry Wives of Windsor: “Hang-hog is latten for Bacon, I warrant you.” Here’s what Michell says about this: “This comic exchange echoes a Bacon family joke, included with other anecdotes in the 1671 edition of Francis Bacon’s Resuscitutio. It was about his father, Sir Nicholas. At the end of a trial in which he was judge, Sir Nicholas Bacon was about to pass sentence of death when the prisoner asked for his mercy on the grounds that they were related:

‘Prithee,’ said my lord judge, ‘how came that in?’

‘Why, if it please you, my lord, your name is Bacon and mine is Hog, and in all ages Hog and Bacon have been so near kindred that they are not to be separated.’ ‘Ay; but’, replied Judge Bacon, ‘you and I cannot be kindred except you be hanged; for Hog is not Bacon until it be well hanged.’

‘Hang-hog is Latin for Bacon’ is surely a reference to this joke. Its occurrence in The Merry Wives of Windsor is a mystery, typifying much of the Baconian evidence. It is suggestive and provocative, but leads to no particular conclusion.” To which I say, “Nonsense.” There’s no reason some version of the Latin joke couldn’t have been in wide circulation before the lives of both Lord Bacon and Shakespeare and/or that it couldn’t have occurred to some schoolboy who knew nothing of Bacon’s family. Or Shakespeare could have heard the Bacon joke and used (part of) it. For people like Michell, however, trivial coincidences don’t exist, only mysteries.

All kinds of wasted energy has been devoted by Baconians to parallelisms—thoughts, phrases and expressions which occur in the writings of both Shakespeare and Bacon. Ignatius Donnelly devoted nearly two hundred pages of “Identical Expressions, Metaphors, Opinions, Quotations, Studies, Errors, Unusual Words, Characters and Styles” of a Baconian book of his of 1888. John Michell is fair enough to present the orthodox response, which is that “there was no special relationship between the two great authors (or, I might insert, between Shakespeare and any other writer someone thinks was really Shakespeare–BG) other than the bond that linked all literary men of their time. This was clearly demonstrated by Harold Bayley in The Shakespeure Symphony, 1906. With scholarly dedication he read through the literature of Bacon’s time, finding the same phrases and metaphors in the works of many different authors.”

Ironically, Bayley used his findings not to vindicate Shakespeare but to show that Bacon was behind the creation of all the great literature of the time by schooling all the competent writers of the time in philosophy, teaching them new words and expressions, and overseeing the writings which he allowed them to publish under their own names. Among the problems with this is that there is no direct or even anecdotal evidence for it. It is also ridiculous.

There is little to be said against the Baconian case as a whole except that the best evidence is all against it, and there is no direct evidence, nor any convincing lesser sort of evidence, for it.

Specific problems with it are that Bacon died in 1626, three years after Heminges and Condell said Shakespeare was dead, which is direct evidence that he was not Shakespeare. There is also the evidence making Shakespeare an actor, which I don’t think even the wackiest advocates for Bacon think Bacon was. That a gigantic, complex, ungainly, preposterously implausible conspiracy would have been required to allow Bacon to secretly be Shakespeare is another grave problem with Bacon’s being Shakespeare. I will be saying more about that later, since it applies to all the contestants in the Who Is Shakespeare Contest—except Will Shakespeare.

Next Chapter here.
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The Cerebral-Satisfaction Drive

BACKGROUND

As part of my attempt during the past 47 years to construct a total theory of psychology, I’ve posited all sorts of brain-mechanisms and cerebral operations. It is only now that I’ve begun to think in terms of the drives that most psychologists believe in, some of which most certainly exist—the reproductive and hunger-satisfaction drives, for instance. Drives have always been part of my theory, but I’ve been mostly interested in details of their functioning rather than with what they are as wholes—for instance, in what poems are, and how the brain makes them, rather than in some drive behind them (a communicative drive, say, or some sort of creativity drive—actually almost certainly a mixture of various drives).

It was in trying (very recently) to write about the attraction of human beings to beauty, that got me involved with drives, for I eventually attributed it to what I called “the sensory-satisfaction drive.” At length I found that to be a sub-drive of what I am temporarily calling the “cerebral-satisfaction drive. Since I have long thought in terms of taxonomies, I connected that to what may be a final drive for human beings and, possibly, all living organisms, “the pleasure-maximization drive.” While I had always been a sort of Benthamite (as I not very deeply understand the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham), and thus believed all of life comes down to a being’s attempt to maximize its pleasure (which, of course, includes minimizing its pain), I had never proposed a drive to carry out the process of maximization.

The best part about thinking of human thought and behavior in terms of drives is how helpfully it simplifies exposition of one’s ideas about said thought and behavior into a followable orderliness. Or so I found it to be. (And if the rest of this essay doesn’t convince you it is, that will only be due to your not having read the essay I wrote before this one, without bringing in drives till the very end.)

In any case, the drive I like the best is the cerebral-satisfaction drive, which I’m making the subject of this essay. Before getting to it, though, I need to tell you about the evaluceptual awareness. And before getting to that, I need to introduce you to my theory of multiple awarenesses.

Much of my theorizing about the brain goes far from the borders of certified science, but not my multiple awarenesses theory, which has much in common with Howard Gardner’s “multiple intelligences,” and he’s a prize-winning certified Harvard scientist. It may well have been from him that I got my idea for my awarenesses. Be that as it may, I long ago proposed that the brain consists of a number of separate (but complexly inter-related) divisions of brain function, each concerned with constructing a different major understanding of existence. I distinguished them from Gardner’s intelligences by name because of they seem more different than similar to his.

So far, I posit ten awarenesses. I’m not sure whether I have too many or too few. In any case, “the evaluceptual awareness,” is one of them. Perhaps the first awareness (or proto-awareness) that evolved after what I call “the fundaceptual awareness,” it has to do with pleasure—and its opposite, pain. The evaluceptual awareness is at the core of what this essay is about, but I need first to give you an idea of the fundaceptual awareness to be able to describe its workings.

THE FUNDACEPTUAL AWARENESS

My idea of the fundaceptual awareness is boringly uncontroversial: it’s the awareness that has to do with the perception of self and other—with fundamental glandular and sensual perceptual data of the entire material world. It employs a huge number of sensory-receptors to gather “percepts.” I believe I use that term much as most others involved with neurophysiology (or whatever my subject is) do, but to avoid confusion, I need to emphasize that I define it simply as the kind of neurocept that is transmitted (in one guise or another) by a fundaceptual sensory-receptor to the fundaceptual awareness when the receptor is activated by the presence of a given stimulus in a person’s outer or inner environment—a particular photon in a particular locus in the person’s field of vision, say.

A neurocept is my coinage for “smallest unit of data the brain deals with.” There are many of these in my theory besides the percept, several of which I will be introducing you to.

The fundaceptual awareness has a second function which is close to as important as its first: the storage and retrieval of memories—which brings us to the essential organ of the fundaceptual awareness—and of the cerebrum as a whole: a mechanism I call the mnemoduct.

The mnemoduct consists of a tube of units called mnemo-dots, or m-dots, for short. One such cell, or organelle (I have no idea what they really are but feel confident something like them must exist), becomes active during every instacon (i.e., instant of consciousness) of a person’s lifetime, remaining active only until that instacon ends, never to become active again. During its period of activity, it records all the percepts then delivered to the fundaceptual awareness. When the instacon ends, the m-dot right after it on the mnemoduct becomes active and records another group of percepts. Ergo, the mnemoduct records a person’s interaction with his inverionments in chronological order.

Pretty simple, right? Actually, I’ve already ridiculously over-simplified my theory: I hypothesize many mnemoducts, for instance, one of many complications I will ignore on the grounds that my theory, while possibly simplistic to an extreme, is also impossible to describe in any kind of accessible way in less than an essay ten times the length of this one—at least by me.
So, we will go with one mnemoduct instead of many, and ignore all kinds of associated cells.

Now, then, while a given m-dot is active, the m-dot active during the prior instacon will attempt to activate previously stored percepts as units of memory which I term retrocepts. Let’s call this m-dot, the “remembering-dot.” The m-dot active just after it I will term the “outcome-dot.” Any retrocept that the remembering-dot succeeds in activating will be recorded in the outcome-dot along with the percepts it is simultaneously recording. So each m-dot will end its period of activation with a clump of percepts indicating what it is going on in the person’s inner and outer environments, and a clump of contextually-appropriate retrocepts.

To be contextually-appropriate, a retrocept must have followed one or more neurocepts in the remembering-dot a significant number of times—and other neurocepts in most or all of a number of the m-dots strung out behind the remembering-dot. A simple example should clarify this. Let remembering-dot X contain neurocept I (which could have come to it as either a percept or a retrocept). Let the eight m-dots just before X contain, in order, neurocepts A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H.

If, say, there is a string of three m-dots somewhere, the first of which contains P; the second, I; and the third Q, I in m-dot X would send some energy to Q, because it once followed it, but very little because of how little appropriate Q is contextually. It would send much more energy to an m-dot holding J that immediately follows a string of m-dots containing, in order, retrocepts A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I and J—probably enough to activate J, with substantial contextual appropriateness. In short, remembering-dot X will be using memory-string A through I to activate J.

THE EVALUCEPTUAL AWARENESS

We are now ready, finally, to consider the evaluceptual awareness. To provide a little direct, scientifically-responsible background on it, here’s a few small smears of information from Wikipedia concerning certified neurophysiology’s equivalent of the evaluceptual awareness: “the perception of pain starts with the nociceptors . . . commonly found in the skin, membranes, deep fascias, mucosa, connective tissues of visceral organs, ligaments and articular capsules, muscles, tendons, periosteum, and arterial vessels . . . (which send) signal(s) to the brain when activated.”

Note: I don’t like “nociceptors,” so my name for pain-receptors is . . . “owceptors.”
Elsewhere in the Wikipedia entry I’m citing, all kinds of things are done with pain “in the spinal cord; midbrain; brainstem sites such as the parabrachial nucleus, the dorsal raphe (where facilitation or inhibition of neuron-activity takes place), locus coeruleus, and the medullary reticular formation involving . . . noradrenaline, serotonin, dopamine, histamine, and acetylcholine”—neurotransmitters many of which my theory is concerned with, acting pretty much as the experts say—but under different, made-up names, because of my use of them with almost no biochemical vocabulary, at all.

Wikipedia is curiously sparse about pleasure: “Pleasure can be considered from many different perspectives, from physiological (such as the hedonic hotspots that are activated during the experience) to psychological (such as the study of behavioral responses towards reward). Pleasure has also often been compared to, or even defined by many neuroscientists as, a form of alleviation of pain.”
The Wikipedia article goes on to indicate areas in the brain having to do with pleasure, but says nothing more about them. One of these areas (I guess it’s an area rather than a mechanism) is the “dorsal raphe.” I’m wrong. I just looked it up in Wikipedia and found that it’s part of a group of nuclei called the “raphe nuclei” whose main function is the release of serotonin to the rest of the brain—that is, according to my theory, it is (or acts with) the evaluceptual awareness to carry out the functions of a mechanism I call “the evaluplex,” and will soon be telling you about.

Actually, the Wikipedia article has very little connection to my theory except for its list of a few neurotransmitters undoubtedly important (by other names) in my theory, and for vaguely mentioning mechanisms I hypothesize but misname, or their likely loci in the brain. Whether any of my mechanisms, or mechanisms like them, actually exist, is unknown (so far as I know). I don’t believe they are known not to exist . . . ‘cause I can always say they are just too teeny weeny to be seen using the instruments available now! In truth, I think one or more of them could be found if looked for. One thing is sure, I claim they are material entities that do exist and carry out operations that break no known laws of nature, so my theory is definitely falsifiable.

Little in my theory of evaluceptuality seems to me particularly revolutionary. Like, I’m sure, almost all other accounts of pleasure and pain, it deals with a wide variety of specific kinds of them such as the auditory pleasure of a theme in a musical composition or the tactile pain of a bee-sting. Where it becomes unconventional is in its division of pain and pleasure into two importantly different general kinds: physical, like the pain of the bee-sting mentioned, and cerebral, like the pleasure of the musical theme. The two kinds could also be termed “reflexive” and “learned,” or, even, “direct” and “indirect,” but I prefer “physical” and “cerebral.”

The evaluceptual awareness’s frontline mechanism is the reptiliplex, so-named because we share it with reptiles. Its concern is physical pleasure and pain. Just to the rear of the awareness’s frontlines, the predictiplex, so-named for reasons which will become clear in due course, deals with cerebral pleasure and pain. The only other major evaluceptual mechanism is the afore-mentioned evaluplex—so named because it is where the brain’s final “evaluation” is made of how good or bad each moment in our lives feels, and various reactions to that evaluation are initiated.

At this point, I need to introduce two more terms: “owcept” for what neurophysiologists mean by “nociocept” (or pain percept) but I think inferior to my term for obvious reasons, and “ahcept” for “pleasure percept,” for which orthodox neurophysiologists have no term I’m aware of. Note: each owcept and ahcept indicates not only pain or pleasure but the unique site of the pain or pleasure—e.g., “cold at locus 16 on the left index finger.”

The Reptiliplex

Our vocabulary should now be sufficient for what’s to come, so I can say a little more about the reptiliplex. By far the simplest of the evaluceptual awareness’s three major mechanisms, it is entirely concerned with the input of evaluceptual sensory receptors sensitive to various stimuli in the inner and outer environments that the receptors automatically take as either physical pleasure or pain: the scent of lilacs, for instance, or a warm fire on a cold day; a twisted ankle or the smell of excrement.

All the reptiliplex does is act as a port of entry for all the ahcepts and owcepts (or evalucepts) it is notified of by the evaluceptual sensory receptors during each instacon, which it passes on to the outcome-dot to be enter the consciousness of the person involved with all the other neurocepts there, and stored.

The Predictiplex

The mnemoduct is to the predictiplex what the inner and outer environments are to the reptiliplex: the source of signals from sensory receptors that the predictiplex is responsible for dealing with. At bottom, what the predictiplex does is simple:

(1) it learns which of the memories the m-dot becoming the outcome-dot during a given instacon tries to activate it succeeds in activating, and which of them it fails to activate;

(2) then, based on this information, it formulates the value of a number of evaluceptual ratios, each such ratio indicating some group of inter-related neurocepts’ pleasure to pain ratio;

(3) each such value will be somewhere from negative 1.0 up to positive one. The predictiplex converts whatever it is to a number of cerebral owcepts to the degree that the value is low up to a value of . . . negative 0.5, say.

It performs no conversion of any value between negative 0.5 and . . . positive 0.5, say, to either owcepts or ahcepts (although it may convert it to “nullcepts” but I consider that possibility too unimportant to get into here).

Any value higher than positive 0.5 it converts to a number of cerebral ahcepts to the degree that the value is high. Unless the value goes beyond . . . positive 0.7, say, whereupon it gradually reduces the number of ahcepts it converts the value to until it reaches positive 0.8, say. Values between that number and 0.9 it either ignores or converts to nullcepts.

Here I bring in something most psychologists, in my view, seriously neglect: boredom. According to my psychology, the more the ratio rises above positive 0.9, the more it indicates not pleasure, but boredom—painful boredom, possibly comparable to the pain of a kidney stone, or the like. Ergo, an evaluceptual ratio above positive 0.8 will be converted to a number of cerebral owcepts to the degree that the value is high.

Note: the only original ideas I’m presenting in this essay are what cerebral evaluceptuality is and the evaluceptual importance of boredom;

(4) The predictiplex will then multiply each ratio by the number of evalucepts that were involved in its determination, and transmit them to the outcome-dot, which will now be in the process of activation.

(5) There the physical evalucepts the m-dot has just gotten will be experienced as a mixture of specific pleasures and pains, such as a kiss or painful ankle (but most likely not many because of the generally focused nature of the flow of instacons through the conscious mind, and the cerebral evalucepts will be experienced as a mixture of cerebral pleasure or pain, such as the pleasure of a fraction of a song, or the annoyance of having to cough.

Important Note: Almost every physical evaluceptual experience will include some portion of cerebral evaluceptuality and vice versa. For instance, a tasty meal will be mostly physically pleasant, but have elements of cerebral pleasure mixed in, such as the unfamiliarity of a special meat sauce; and a delightful piece of music will mostly convey cerebral pleasure, but may add the pleasure of various physical pleasure, as well, such as the innately physical pleasure of a certain chord, and other elements pleasurable for other reasons than their being neither too familiar nor too unfamiliar. In this introductory text, however, I tend to suggest any evaluceptual experience is either all physical or all cerebral to, again, make my ideas easier to follow.

EVALUCEPTUAL ENHANCEMENT AND INHIBITION

It is at this point that the evaluceptual cycle begun by the activation of the remembering-dot and continued by the outcome-dot’s activation ends with the evaluplex’s activities:

(1) Like both the reptiliplex and the predictiplex, the evaluplex is connected to sensory receptors; its will tell it how many more ahcepts than owcepts the outcome-dot ends with, if it has more ahcepts than owcepts, or how many more owcepts than ahcepts it has if the contrary is the case.

Note: I suspect the situation is more complex than that, perhaps much more complex, but what I’m describing is possible, too, and close enough to what I’m sure actually occurs if my theory is anywhere near correct, at all, so I feel free to consider it here as I’ve just described it.

(2) It will facilitate the ability of all the neurocepts in the outcome-dot to activate memories (to go from J to K, after getting to J from I, for instance) in proportion to how many ahcepts it is reacting to, or inhibit the ability of all the evalucepts in the outcome-dot to activate memories in proportion to how many owcepts it is reacting to:

(3) Ergo, the evaluplex will make us repeat whatever we do or think in a given situation that leads to pleasure and avoid repetition of whatever we do that leads to pain. Simple. Freudian repression. And the opposite. (I don’t recall if Freud hypothesized a mirror image of repression; if not, he should have.) The over-all goal is the satisfaction of the pleasure-maximization drive.
(4) My theory also assumes the evaluplex will activate various reactions to increase the pleasure of anything that leads to pleasure, and decrease the pain of anything that leads to pain. Note: these will be relatively slow, cerebrum-based responses. The cerebellum and pre-cerebellar reflexes will already have caused animal responses like fight or flight, and carried out appropriate facilitation or inhibition of future physical responses. Among the cerebral reactions I’m speaking of will be heightened attention where appropriate, increased ability to think of effective responses, appropriate anger or happiness . . .

I think the neurophysiological establishment already agrees with me at least loosely with the effects of physical pleasure and pain since all I’m positing is that a person will be less likely to repeat actions that lead to physical pain, many of them biological harmful, and more likely to repeat actions that led to physical pleasure, many of them biologically beneficial.

Since I first came up with my theory of cerebral evaluceptuality almost fifty years ago, inspired by a paperback called Precious Rubbish by someone named Shaw (Theodore L., not George Bernard), which made me realize how important avoidance of boredom is in art—and everything else, and the central importance of familiarity, I’ve been bemused by how little familiarity and boredom seem to have been discussed by the experts in the relevant fields. Perhaps because taken for granted? Or because so many vested interests rely on other value determinants in art and life as a whole? In any event, I am now ready to discuss the main subject of my essay:

THE CEREBRAL-SATISFACTION DRIVE

Among the many drives various levels beneath The Pleasure-Maximization Drive are the Cerebral-Satisfaction Drive and the Reptilian-Satisfaction Drive. Each of these has numerous sub-sub-drives like the auditory-satisfaction drive, the reproduction-drive and the warm bath drive. Needless to say, there are sundry lower-level drives, like the mathematics drive, and—under it, the algebra drive—or the dessert drive down to the green-gumdrop drive. The nature of each depends on what awareness or sub-awareness its home is.

First, I want to review what most exactly happens during any instance of cerebral evaluceptual . . . analysis, let’s call it. A person experiences a mental event, then his brain predicts what it will experience next based on the supposition that what he has experienced in similar circumstances before will be repeated. If its prediction is wrong, the person will experience pain due to unfamiliarity (in context). If the prediction is right, but not too right, he will experience the pleasure of the expected, or familiarity. If the prediction is too right, he will experience pain due to boredom, or excessive familiarity. With fairly large expanses of neutral, or blah, evaluceptual experience, which I’ll ignore here on out, as not relevant. Very simple.

The cerebral-satisfaction drive I’ve chosen as my primary illustrating specimen of all cerebral-satisfaction drives is auditory-satisfaction. One reason for this is that I agree with Nietzsche that without music, life would be a mistake (although most of the time I would say that without music, life would be more of a mistake). A better is that it’s the drive that most readily reveals how cerebral evaluceptuality works to provide maximal cerebral satisfaction and how important this is biologically in spite of the fact that music is the purest of the arts, since it has minimal (or possibly no) utility. It is just about only capable, horror of horrors, of giving us pleasure.

Take a simple song. If it’s original at all, it will strike a hearer as unfamiliar. Mental pain will be the result. But once one hears it enough times, it will start seeming at least somewhat predictable, and one will become neutral about it. Soon one will have heard it enough for it to be just familiar enough for it to seem nice. The melody and the orchestration are friends now, but not yet old friends. We are now ever-so-slightly surprised when they appear, but instantly find them welcomely familiar.

Eventually, though, most of us will become so well-acquainted with the piece that, rather than recognize what it does as we hear it, we will know what it does as it does it. We will then lose interest in it. If we keep hearing it, however, we will come to know in advance everything it will do so absolutely, it will irk us, perhaps even anger us. But . . .

A gifted jazzman who can provide us with variations on the piece will be able to give it again the ability to surprise us. Those previously annoyed with it will like it again, unless they find it at first too defamiliarized and have to learn their way back to enjoyment of it; those not out of enjoyment of it in its original form may find the jazzed-up version of it a crime. Sensitivity to music, you see, varies from individual to individual. Some can be too slow ever to appreciate a song, or ever to appreciate a variation on a song. Others may be faster but not fast enough on the uptake ever to tire of a song, once able to appreciate it.

It should be said that rewriting a song, or the equivalent—performing it with a band instead of a single singer, or with a symphonic orchestra, etc.—isn’t the only way to revive a song. A listener may learn things about its composer or about music in general, that changes him and not the song, and in that way makes the combination of what the song brings to him and he brings to the song new enough to make it or keep it enjoyable for him.

One more point: when a jazzman or the equivalent re-renders a song, it will make parts of the original unexpected enough to give pleasure. The listener will not be sure which of the two versions will be next, although he will recognize each when he hears it. Which reminds me that (1) simply hiding from the song once it becomes too familiar will give one time to lose his memory’s grip on it sufficiently to make it seem fresh again and (2) listening to other music, particularly music much different from it, may well do the same thing—the listener will hear a short sequence of notes that he’s later heard in a different piece of music, and thus be momentarily uncertain what comes next, with enjoyment.

While on the subject, I might as well add that performing the song oneself, as singer or instrumentalist, adds a great deal to one’s appreciation of it because one then accompanies the song with a muscular accompaniment of it—one that can be quite varied. For instance, a singer can change the way he sings a song once it starts turning dull for him. Ditto dancing to the song. Or giving it dancers on a stage for one to watch as it is performed. The simple act of following a piece in score will do the same thing—double it into two expressive modalities, conceptual symbols as well as heard sounds.

Here’s another way of putting all this: each new song begins as an addition to reality, and is difficult to accept. Eventually it is accepted. It is now just short of being full-scale quotidian reality—that with which we are totally familiar—which it soon becomes. Boredom. So an artist must replace it with another addition to reality, or make it new.

Actually, every new song is a variation on reality that acts as an intruder on reality; it is a distortion of some portion of familiar reality that takes time to undistort into the happily known-but-not-entirely-known. An original song (by which I mean sufficiently different from every other song to seem new to almost all who hear it) is a variation, to a greater or lesser extent, on all the music prior to it; a representational painting is a variation on the visually real that differs from it in being immobile, probably slightly different in color, arrangement, etc., and context; a misrepresentational painting—impressionistic paintings are a good example—shows us reality as it isn’t, but becomes in art (children almost automatically like representational paintings but take time to appreciate impressionism—I was 17 or 18 when I finally connected to it); then there is nonrepresentational painting that has little to do with the real world, all to do with painting (the way music even at its simplest has little to do with the real world, all to do with music).

Normal prose is the equivalent of representational painting: it is not part of the material world but as close to it as symbols can be: it denotes it so well at its clearest, it disappears. The result would be narrative art if it told a story, but not linguistic art. The words would be utilitarian—just devices used to create the story.

High rhetoric uses words just “unrepresentationally” enough to give linguistic pleasure, and thus an artistic accompaniment to a text that, as a whole, is not art—a political speech, for instance. Poetry is the form of linguistic expression in which linguistic misrepresentationality is a central element, the intention of its words being to not be prose due to its many artificialities, even when seeming cut-up prose (when it evades prose through the use of lineation, which—to those most sensitive to what poetry can do—can be potently misrepresentatively enjoyable.

What I’m saying, if I’ve lost you, is that poetry’s words distort reality by ever-so-slightly misnaming or misrepresenting parts of it. Consider a simple metaphor, for example: Romeo calling Juliet the morning sun. Meter is another way of misrepresenting reality—by giving it a regular beat, which neither it nor prose generally has. Even free verse distorts the reality that is its subject by breaking it into irregular pieces by making its lines end in unexpected places instead of more or less at the same place every time unlike prose (except in the special case of paragraph ends).

I think I’ve digressed enough. I hope that my idea of the goldilocksian way the cerebral-satisfaction drive works is clear, makes sense, and has brought you cerebral satisfaction of the highest order.