Entry 546 — I’m Back Home, and in Good shape
I walked to the hospital (about ) 2 miles from my home, getting there at a little after 5 AM. My appointment was for 5:30. My friend Linda got me home at a little after 10 AM, even though we made two small trips, one to the drugstore and one to Staples so I could buy cover stock for Marton’s book. My surgeon had told me he’d talk to me after the procedure, but he didn’t. I’m sure things went okay, though; otherwise, I’d not have been let go. One disappointment–I have to wear a catheter for six days rather than the two I’d been told I’d have to.
I’m pretty tired, this time for the legitimate reason that I only slept a half-an-hour last night. I didn’t feel particularly edgy, for I wasn’t anxious about the procedure. Maybe my body was. Stress affects it much more than it affects the part of my brain the brain calls “me.” As is often the case when I have insomnia, I had quite a few ideas. One of them was a refinement of my long-held belief that it’s unfair to hold an innovative poem to the same standards of clarity a conventional poem is held to since the former is likely only clear because one reading it has been educated in the reading of such poems since nursery school or earlier, and has (probably) not been exposed to anything like what he needs to have been to find an innovative poem clear.
The refinement is a new term: “the clarity-to-exposure ratio.” Or how clear a poem is to an engagent on a scale of, say, one to a hundred, and how much exposure he’s had to poems of its kind on the same scale. Hence, a poem by Frost may have a clarity rating of 95, but an exposure rating of 95, as well, because of what school teachers have taught him about formal verse, and his memory of nursery rhymes, and much else. One of my mathemaku may have a clarity rating of 8 (because it will have understandable words and recognizable mathematical symbols and, perhaps, recognizable graphic images). It may have the same c-to-e ratio as the Frost poem, though, if its exposure rating is only 8,which it could well be because no such poems will have been taught to its engagent.
Offhand, I would say a poem approaches ideal clarity to the degree its clarity-to-exposure ratio approaches point nine. After its exposure rating has reached 100. I make point nine (or some such figure) the ideal because perfect clarity is boring. That I consider a fact of aesthetics, not an opinion.
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