Sunday, April 5, 2009

The i! binary in the word-punctle matrix


I dreamt of space—infinite space, unfettered by words: this is the archetypal punctle; that which existed before the master-slave dialectic in whose grumpy grip the text now writhes—grumpy indeed. Let us look at the relationship of inverted reflexivity in the punctle and the letter (that odious elemental fragment of the word): “i” and “!”—indeed!—the concept “i” encompasses all that is essential in the word-essence: it is the “me” of the aforementioned me-we binary and it is central to the personal identity of the text. Opposite this monument to the ego is the exclamatory mark, incidentally a capsized “i”— the collective entity at odds with the personal entity: the collective text. In “i!” exists the totality of a text—a truly individualized work; one that encompasses the individual and the collective; the conscious and the unconscious.

It is for the infinite pleasure that moments of creative intuition afford me (when the obvious-obscure binary that haunts academic fervor bursts at the seams to unveil a golden nugget) that I embrace a total loss of touch with reality.

-i!

Friday, April 3, 2009

The Subconscious Punctle

Foregoing my expoundation on The Jungian Jungle: The Archetypal Punctle, I am obliged to make public my theoretical leanings—though I permit myself such a confession with the resolute, unwavering Esperanza that those readers from whom a diatribe against Jungian analysis may flurry forth (indubitably a product of that healthy academic libido native to the doctorial mind) shall be sweet-tempered in their refutation, for I am but a wounded bird that quakes in the wake of a certain raging synesthete’s laceration of self-consciousness; indeed, victory in the cerebral Tourney of the Ego (woeful the innumerable losses us citizens of Academia have endured through such violent jousting) was of a gilded nature and forth must I trot a Britomarian gait, ever-parrying phallic inquisition.

Yes, Post-Jungian woe is me!

Forget us not that "In the beginning there was pause" and following this pause emerged the word—indeed, the textual identity is fleshed forth via the “me-we"” binary: the punctles: the archetypal symbols ubiquitous—the subconscious of a content; and the word: the conscious dimension comprised of the rational impulse to differentiate a particular work from countless others.

Thus content-identity issues forth.

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

The Vicissitudes of Publication

Afore embarking on a sweeping exploration of The Jungian Jungle: The Archetypal Punctle, our Speaker’s troubled fancy falls prey to the whip of a biting whim:

“Most Beloved and Esteemed Reader,

The nobility of Academe implores that I hold my authorship accountable for inconsistencies in publication shedules; and yet I conjecture: does not the fickleness of a gentle muse, mutable and wispy in her tendency to withdraw at the slightest provocation, pardon the creative mind’s inconstancy? Genius does not acquiesce to Chronian demands! (If naught else thy cerebrum appropriates from my life’s devotion, this adage do consider).

Fervently,

Yours truly”

Following this proto-prologue (affront the luminance of a steady screen) she heralds forth the first droppings of a creative flush—fidgets on her stool as she pushes on letters that spring:

“In the beginning there was pause.
And the book was without form, and most promising; and space was on the face of the page. And the muse of the creator wrote upon the page of the space.
And the creator said, Let there be words: and there were words.
And the creator saw the word, and it was good; and the creator divided the word from the space…”

Sunday, March 29, 2009

The punctles in the fray


Following a sad sojourn in slander’s bungalow, our errant scholar returns (at the behest of her intellect) to those ubiquitous punctles—the subjects of her ingenuity, the tormentors of her craft. Indeed, the artistry of academic pursuits; the chiseling of thought for the fashioning of publications, wearies her tender muse—and yet exhaustion does not emerge at the cost of coherence. Indeed, her moments of most profound lucidity are marked by a creeping sense that she is nothing more than an essential element in a faltering assemblage of academics. To falter: to cough dry dust at the doorstep of esoteric knowledge; to suddenly lose one’s bearings amidst a concrete labyrinth of motorcars, only to realize at the last moment of that sweet consciousness preceding full blown heat exhaustion that the punctle is the life.

And yet, all this musing—this flirting with philosophical philandering—condenses into a penetrating thought: the puissance of the punctle can be found in the Jungian jungle: in the archetypal punctle.

Monday, March 16, 2009

Bellum: Placitum Stilus: Partie Trois


To miss a point, yes: to gender it; to presuppose an assumed sexuality: Miss Space; Miss Parenthesis; Miss Exclamation! Indeed, I have missed the point, and why ever should I not? These punctles have not been castrated, no—they’ve been given the opportunity to unveil themselves fertility goddesses amidst a male dominated content—an alphabet fettered by the phallic; thralled by the masculine! Should I feign surprise when a quack of an academic, assuming expertise in the dethronement of the book, attempts to loosen this blog’s supremacy of influence via the pillaging of character? Surprise, I feign not! Misogyny, I admonish! Indeed, content is the sacrificial element of a text. Let us turn to Jesse Weston:

“To sum up the result of the analysis, I hold that we have solid grounds for the belief that the story postulates a close connection between the vitality of a certain king, and the prosperity of his kingdom; the forces of the ruler being weakened or destroyed, by wound, sickness, old age, or death, the land becomes waste, and the task of the hero is that of restoration.”

This certain king: phallic content; the prosperity of his kingdom: the synesthetic quality of the text! I borrow from this fool’s vocabulary to prove a point: castration points to the loss of textual virility, but most pressing, it unveils the need for restoration; the necessity of a “sacrificial lamb” to bring about the resurrection of a “synesthetic-event” within the text. The content, then, shall be sacrificed to the punctles; the male to the female! Hence, a new age of textual scholarship will surface: one marked by the fecundity of the fertile female.

And so this Speaker yelps in a fit of creative ecstasy: "To miss the point entirely is to de-male the text; to bring about a new age of artistic proliferation to replace the wasteland left in the wake of phallic Fascism!"

Bellum: Placitum Stilus: Partie Deux


Missed the point entirely! wails the heaving Speaker, at once overcome by arrhythmia amid a hallucinatory swirl of publications past, all a rising mirage; a phantasmagoria encircling like a haunting halo around the sad relics of a frenzied mind (so our non compos mentis Speaker fantasizes). And before her eyes, this conjured corona, rimmed with paper peppered in thought (symbol of a cloistered incline) cascades brusquely into a thudding puddle of dust—yes, a feverish fall; she faints: a not so final collapse.

. . . . .


Her eyelids flutter open in the dead of night, and following the blissfully fleeting moments of befuddled wonderment, the echoes of slander begin to meander forth—first as hollow shocks akin to the opaque dream-images of a life past, and then in shocking waves that pulse to amalgamate auditory hallucination; granting depth to the settling of an unsettled, encroaching sense:

“Missed the point entirely! Missed the point entirely!”


Thus following this histrionic swoon, our unnerved Speaker installs herself on a perch afore the shocking white of a luminescent screen to face her foe—assassin of character; bringer of woe . . . .

Monday, March 9, 2009

Bellum: Placitum Stilus: Partie Une


Fearing a public outcry in the wake of a (truly) infinitesimal veering from Punctal Theorem, the quaking Speaker bleats forth a blubbering apologia in the form of a plea:

“I mean not to prevaricate, dear friends, upon an occasion that makes desperate call for utter seriosity—indeed, I am well aware that my beloved audience finds itself in perfervid expectation of a theological expoundation on “The Punctles that Pervade” (said article penned by this very modest Speaker, published in the November Edition of yesteryear’s Punctative Metatheatricality and the Metaphysics of Liferature (Vol. 30, No.1), and weep at the thought that the impeccable whiteness of my vocation and the eager, inquisitive eyes of my unsuspecting readers will be tinged (blood red) by the salivating snare of infamy—oh my!—slander!—oh my!—scandal!: my expertise? Questioned! My character? Defamed! My sanity? Denied!

“My dear despairing audience, I mean not to alarm—though my diction coupled with the rhetorical employment of the pathetic punctles through the repeated alternation of the interrogative and exclamatory marks (subject elucidated by this author in the aforementioned “The Punctles that Pervade”) would suggest otherwise. Sincerity forces me to shed light on the verity of this factuality: I must contend with the deranged ramblings of a gnosiophobic maniac—a so-called “synesthete” who drafted a severe slander of this here academic’s expertise . . .

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Pathetic division within Modernity's Punctal Theory

Meistersinger Hans Sachs writes:

"My friend, just this is poet’s task:
His dreams to read and to unmask.
Trust me, illusion’s truths thrice sealed
In dream to man will be revealed.
All verse-craft and poetisation
Is but soothdream interpretation."

This sad translation from that most jubilantly biting of tongues reveals the oft noted link between the dream-world and the poetic inspiration: a link that Dickinson undoubtedly and (likely) relentlessly clutched to as she dipped her pen in the blue sinews of her ink-stained mind. No doubt, her use of the dash in light of this exhausted and slightly delusional Speaker’s discernments proves that the stringed series of her innumerable poems should be read as the relics of a haunting dream sequence. Indeed, pathos is the logos of dreams—in that world of moldy designs and distorted lines, only feeling can gift the accolade of sense; and is poetry not the billowing eccho of this innate incline? In poetry we find reverie, the day-light equivalent of our nocturnal speculations. And punctles, the bringers of sense; the heralds of logos amidst a fray of lexical strife, must vest themselves in the garb of emotional enterprise. Leading the pathetic division within the larger dimension of Modern Punctal Theory tiptoes the dash, slinking along like a snake through a darkening culvert, followed by the eager (!!!) exclamatory mark, finally skirted by the somber suspension of the ellipsian flecks.

The dashes; the sparks

Hinging the moment from slumber to stir is a tittering dash—a horizontal slash of the kind that clinches the sky and the land: an elusive, penumbral half-line; a twilight of mind; a movement unfurled and distinctly defined.

This is the dash: the most visceral of the perishing punctles, its aim: to attach. Sentimental, so sentient, the dash marks a pause of delight—one that tickles the mind in quickening rhyme. It is the punctle of dreams: devoid of the logos of colons, the machinations of the subliminal mind rely on the pathos of our most feverish sign. And isn’t it the most ambiguous of our punctative sprites, this frolicking line that billows in roving recline the contents of a diction sublime? Oh, Dickinson knew it!-- when in lonesome concealment she sequestered her mind within the boundaries of these limitless lines; she sings:

The Brain—is wider than the sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and You—beside—

The Brain is deeper than the sea—
For—hold them—Blue to Blue—
The one the other will absorb—
As sponges—Buckets—do—

The Brain is just the weight of God—
For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—
And they will differ—if they do—
As Syllable from Sound—

The pauses of the dash are tempered in movement; they itch to prolong a climactic caesura of restless delay; a tension lax; a furl of electric delight positioning combinations of lexeme amid springing, uncontainable, sparks.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Of dashes (the motions of mind)

A spider once whispered a secret of gossamer line in the ear of a child that read with his mind—it rustled like rhyme—like a crushing of leaves by the darkening wind in the mint of a night—and he closed his eyes—and he opened his mind to the motions abound in the quiet of sound—in the twilight of mind—where the hollows of time begin to mime—where the hand reclines—where the spirit blithe sings in notes so high the Cherubims sigh—and the light takes flight!—for a moment he lies in obscure delight—in a daze of fantastic respite—and a lapis lazuli consumes a cerulean height—in the mind of an eye—where a vision of telescopic delight reigns a supreme right—bending the ridges of time—ebbing the wisps of a wonder back to a slender root—of a mystical kind—where clarity shines like the winks of a light caught in the glaucous ooze of primordial slime—but alas—the sound of a spoon as it clinks on a dish—from a distant smoky ravine—shakes open his lids in violent whisks—and the child sighs—forgetting his might he ebbs into vigilance—arises in time—the spider reclines. 

A ghoul in relics

Following this ardent apology succeeds an argumentation vested in logic’s design:

Whitman’s use of the dash generates a quick movement of breath that mirrors in form the “speeding . . . unreeling” spider’s silken thread. The dash makes the poem, looming thrice at pivotal moments of movement—carrying the momentum of the creative mind in hasty pause. The Speaker imagines Whitman a diligent spider, endlessly weaving his Leaves of Grass in some cottage cranny, eight arms at full length, “ceaselessly musing”—birthing fine linen in ringlets of elegant line; forging and shaping an impulse of soul: a means of design meant to build “till the bridge you will need be formed, Till the ductile anchor hold”. Indeed, Whitman did mark where on a bluff a delicate spider perused its surroundings through lurches of silk, but arguably he did more than this:

“A noiseless patient spider,
I marked where on a little promontory it stood isolated,

Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding”

To mark; to etch on paper: to write—who is this spindling spider? Is it perhaps a vision of our pouncing poet, himself settled neatly in a seat off of a certain wooden (oak) desk—indeed a kind of little bluff? Our spidery poet—your silk has found crevice in the nooks of my moods: the threads of your “O my soul”, silver in substance, still fling in the winds of this gossamer ghoul.

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Pathos in marvel; marble in rhyme

The sentimental speaker slips into pathos (from logos to pathos) as she muses in rhyme, and can you (really) blame her literal lapse?—After all, is poetry not the ultimate pathos; the thought in feeling; the rapturous heart? And does it not befit she who it reads to dazzle in awe; to marvel at maniacal frenzy? Indeed, marvel is marked by an astonished wonder roused by the pangs of a passion, devoid of reason’s hegemony. Echoing the words of a great poet about a certain greatest of poets, she says: let the rhythms of rhyme marvel us to the point of petrification; let the marvel “make us marble with too much conceiving”—the marvel (n): the poetry; the marvel (v): the garnished effect of the reading—the emotion that binds found only in rhyme; the glittering rhetoric; the truth in mirage; let it remind that:

“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

More than cool reason ever comprehends.”

And so, can we blame the ecstatic Speaker; the hapless romantic; for a truant reason, a pathetic incline?

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Whitman's Spider-like Space

What a happy coincidence!—She leafs through a “chronological” labyrinth of rhyme, and encounters a true anachronism: Whitman’s rhythmic measure; and our curious Speaker meanders impulsively into the coils of his silvery thread; suspending suspense as the gauze slithers in thin slivers of verse; a patient spider is he, not pouncing but pensively musing in feathers of fine resplendent line that he shan’t recant.

Oh DubyaDubya, your soul is a spider and the resplendent lines, the filaments, filaments, filaments, a verse that still seizes a moth-of-a-reader in inescapable awe—caught in your words, your filaments raw, she steps a weak foot on the bridge of your gossamer flings and flings down into measureless space, into the vast ocean of wordless pace, and pushing her down is your anchor that pulls as it holds and makes intimate folds in pearly threads of fine diaphanous verse. Your words commence play, and a happy incident indeed the feeling they breed. 

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

(illumination)

The power of the parenthesis (subject, writing) exists in its ability to create parallels—to house within the hooks of two sweeping loops a substance of infinitude, says the bashful Speaker. She wonders: how does the content (within these affectionate half-moons) interact with the lacerated space around? 

(Amidst the onslaught of pointed diction and punctured space exists a sentimental sweep; a pause of thought; a clarification of sorts that means to bring a peace in abridged piece to an arena of inkshed) 

The parenthesis demands a shift in thought, a necessary cognitive movement that illuminates what most readers regard as the main event—but what is “the main event”? (Is it fair to say that the contents of a parenthetical clause are subject to the discrimination of a biased reader, one who (understandably) assumes that what exists within merely informs what exists outside?) 

The twinned horseshoe leaves in its wake a mystique often unaddressed because it is sealed in closure; the reader is comforted by confined content and experiences it as a parallel text, alien though necessarily (and at least) tangential to its context. The parenthesis is almost a whisper; it is a change in tone; in voice;  (and the soothing effect of the bulging pair cannot be thoroughly endured till the reader finds himself frantically searching for that second curl of cessation that will give him leave to settle back into the comfort of the original phrase; he fidgets in loss, forsaken by his writer; an errant reader lost in the literal whims of fancy.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

(story)

Nabokov writes, “My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy has set . . .”

The power of the parenthesis (Parenthetically Mine:

A (very) Short Story

You are my subject; I want to poach this moment (pen the inflections of your flesh—as they undulate on your face—within the slabs of punctured space) and dress myself in its impossible fur (the curve of a cheek dances with the visceral lip as it curls in heat). You say,

"Listen, just listen—",

and your waxen fingers come down like knives on crystal, piercing the hum of the night and it is you that chimes. My hand still resides, a paperweight smidged in dye, on the leaf, still green, lightly peppered in azure tint. This hand is a shade, carefully penning the fantastic blend of ghostly bends that becomes your face; tired and yellow, feeding off of a tense that never remains. Is it in vain? Is it vain?

Come, continue to play . . . let my hand indulge in the supple demands of your arms as they flex and beckon pale spiders like magnets to pounce on a canvas of sound; let me play, let me bounce. Is it fine that my mind reclines into the depths of your sound?

(your eye flutters its lid, plunging serene like a wave slapping a curtain of pain onto soft grains; lapping its honey glaze on the empty space, creating rhythm and rhyme and an endless design that persists in time). You say,

“Can I read what you write?”

My subject, my object—perpetual verb: give me sound; give me rhyme; let your fingers climb up the scale and down the vine. Am I stealing your pride? Let me drink with my mind! Ignore the blue streaks that transverse my specter fin; forget my hands—shift your gaze from my literal veins and continue to play, for you simply shan’t exist a self-referent midge. Don’t pry: you are my subject, my object; you'll wither the vine. You are mine.

(you begrudgingly shift)

I am dry.

The moment has passed.

The period last) exists in its ability to create parallels.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Rilke and the “space”


On the plight of the punctured space, Rilke scrawls: “Dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away, you write, and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.”

Undoubtedly, the concern of the conscientious writer for the haunting space that slinks in blanks of prose and poetry alike can invariably be traced to the nooks and crannies of correspondence. It is in the paragraph preceding this one, the quoted contents of which were happily encountered in Mr. Maria’s Letters to a Young Poet, that the Speaker encounters an authoritative voice amidst the cacophonous clashing cymbals of modern Punctal Theory. And while our sentimental poet’s moving portrayal of heartfelt empathy illuminates the barely absent punctle’s slighted state, it hardly renders its true shape: Rilke’s insight dwells in deliberate word choice, and further, in a certain white male’s inability to resist the temptation to inflect gender upon the space, prefacing what is an otherwise perfectly poignant lament for the loneliness of a certain specter with a deceptively innocent and undoubtedly biting “Dear Sir”. Indeed, the space around the space is geometrically expanding in lonesome leaps; its quest for identity ruthlessly undermined; masculinity thrust upon it as the echoes of the female voice are lost in inscription. Here we have our most neglected punctle, in it’s self-referent glory, mistook for a masculine silhouette: and is it not, this mis-gendered shade, the punctle that pervades?

Monday, February 2, 2009

e.e. Cummings & the              space

The poetry lover cannot delve into a pointed exploration of punctative potential without first immersing herself in the plethora of the .punctuated. g!oo!dness that is e.e. Cummings’ canon. It is in Cummings’ typographical imagery that one encounters a valid counterpart to Eliot and Pound’s experiments in content obscurity. Rather than employ form as that which informs the contents of diction, Cummings forces the reader to regard form the main event. His reversal is truly avant-garde in that it redefines the lyric experience. The profound simplicity of his content is infused with electricity generated through the brilliance of creative punctuation:

Photobucket

Despite the space’s status as the most slighted of our weeping punctles, here (or rather, above) she is the main event: no longer merely skulking unseen through pompous diction, she is given room to be. The grasshopper, becoming as he leaps through space, is the space as she dashes unfettered and finally free from punctual decree. And is she not really the most punctual of our beloved punctles—always on time, coming to be only briefly despite her geometric potential? Truly, the space is the saddest of the bunch: exhausted from use; veiled in an invisibility cloak (why?); and truly oppressed, living in the shadow of (un)sightly words.

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Punctuation is shorthand for ideas.

What little grammar we learn in the classroom approaches punctuation as a mere compass through which our gliding eyes can sail the winds of language, a means only of disembarkation upon the sturdy ground of our writer’s point. Rather than a dimension of rhetoric, punctles are (to the common reader) little more than synchronized pause. It’s no wonder that the average student cannot differentiate between the functionality of a comma and that of a semi-colon; only in poetry and elevated prose do we encounter the ever elusive, heart-tittering dash in all its glory—and last I heard, Emily Dickinson didn’t make the final cut of the SAT’s Verbal portion.

So, what can be said of punctuation?

Very little (though I may prove otherwise) because English education today fails to address the variations of pause—it doesn’t address the momentum of a dash, the ambiguity of ellipses, the exclusivity of parentheses, or the boldness of a colon. Professors and teachers alike complain that their students can’t write; they stress vocabulary, organization, and the necessity of a thesis statement, but fail to explain the nature of a comma.