#framing

"it is dormition"

... Joyce uses the pun as a way of seeing the paradoxical exuberance of being through language. And it was years after he had begun the Wake before he saw that the babble of Anna Livia through the nightworld of the collective consciousness united the towers of Babel and of sleep. In sleep "the people is one and they have all one language" but day overcomes and scatters them. Of this nightworld Joyce says "it is dormition," linking it in a single gesture to Domitian, damnation and all the senses of "subliminial," or doormission, with its links to dormitory, dormeuse, doormouse (Lewis Carroll), door-muse and the daughters of memory.

Some Kind Of Monster

Any movement of appetite within the labyrinth of cognition is a "minotaur" which must be slain by the hero artist. Anything which interferes with cognition, whether concupiscence, pride, imprecision, or vagueness is a minotaur ready to devour beauty. So that Joyce not only was the first to reveal the link between the stages of apprehension and the creative process, he was the first to understand how the drama of cognition itself was the key archetype of all human ritual myth and legend. And thus he was able to incorporate at every point in his work the body of the past in immediate relation to the slightest current of perception.

MIND THE GAP

Andrew Chrystall ‏@chipbody

if I was an evil super genius my social control algorithms would elongate the possibilities for an unexamined life indefinitely.

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Well ... we've got to give the reader something to do !

We don't know who discovered water ... but it certainly wasn't a rower !

Last scream of the missing neighbours ...

"study the apparatus that train people to be satisfied..."

"If the corporate life is to be rendered on paper, the method of discontinuous nonstory must be employed.”

thunder face

Grammatica as the ground of poetics

Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 14:27:14
From: Donald Theall

So many interesting issues have been raised in the last few days on
the McLuhan line, it is difficult to respond to all of them as they
occur. But there are two discussions to which I'd like to make a
contribution.

The first, I believe initially opened up by Francois Lachance,
involves rhetoric and dialectic. What is important to complement the subsequent
discussion is that McLuhan as early as his notorious, but seldom read,
Nashe thesis stressed that the important aspects of the discussion of
the history of the trivium were for him related to grammar and to
poetics.

For McLuhan grammar was the primary aspect of the trivium, but the
most important discipline was poetics. As he notes in the thesis, citing
Aristotle, Aquinas on Aristotle and various Renaissance thinkers,
poetics is the universal science ñ perhaps in Viconian terms, the "new
science" ("new" since it was unthought of as a science among
Enlightenment scientists).

Without going into all the details of the thesis or other references,
poetics embraces grammar and rhetoric as well as those aspects of
dialectic which do not give dialectic or logic an overwhelming place
(such as in many of the Scholastics [not Aquinas] and in Ramus). The
enemies of the poetics McLuhan promoted as he puts it in the thesis
are:

The ignorant
Pretenders to learning & taste
Powerful class of civil lawyers & likewise medical men
Who despise it because poetry does not get wealth
Philosophers, dialecticians scoff at frivolity & mendacity = liars
Schoolmen
Most powerful foe is puritanical theologians.

There is much more that could and will ultimately be said, but for
McLuhan rhetoric matters and dialectic has place because grammatica is
the ground of poetics.

The second motif has to do with some of the implications of Zagreus
in _The Apes of God_. While all that has been said about Zagreus's role
is present in the action of the work, the choice of the name Horace
Zagreus and what circles around it is very significant. Horace would seem to
be a pun on Horus and Horace, while Zagreus-Dionysius is a name
associated with the inner depths of the Eleusinian mysteries ñ all tied up with
Lewis's refrain about the freemasonry of the arts in _The Apes_ a
theme picked up from a similar play on the mysteries and the emergence
of the occult in the Enlightenment in Pope's _Dunciad_ (a work which
provides the climax to _The Gutenberg Galaxy_).

McLuhan's fascination with the Eleusinian mysteries is well-known.
So the whole motif of Dionysiac embodiment in both its pre-Christian and
pre-Masonic directions are implicated. One might also note the play
of Horace (Horus) and the Dionysiac carnivalesque, which involves the two
aspects of the satiric.

Best wishes,

Donald Theall

Energized Language : melopeia, phanapoeia, and logopeia

Date: Sat, 12 May 2001 12:43:17 -0400
From: Donald Theall

Hi Bob,

Eric certainly has a way of half-grasping what is going on with
Marshall. I thought you might be interested, if you did not already
remember, in what Pound actually says and how what Marshall says about
a "mental dance", while it may have been inspired by it, profoundly
differs from it.

The most extended text of Pound's on "the dance of the intellect
among words" is in _How to Read_ where he says that poetry is language
charged or energized in various ways. There are three ways melopeia,
phanapoeia, and logopeia. The first is words charged with some
musical property which directs the bearing or trend of the meeting; the second
"is a casting of images upon the visual imagination", as for the
third:

"LOGOPEIA, `the dance of intellect among words', that is to say it
employs words not only for their direct meaning, but it takes count in
a special way of habits of usage, of the context we expect to find with
the word, its usual concomitants, of its known acceptances and of
ironical play. . . . It is the latest come, and perhaps most tricky
and undependable mode."

In other words Marshall speaking of speech as a mental dance is quite
different from Pound's discussion of poetry. It is also interesting
to note that Pound was suspicious of poetry which emphasized logopoeia,
preferring the visual and musical energizing. The master of combining
logopoeia with the other two is certainly Joyce's Wake and we know
what Pound thought of Joyce's Wake.

Marshall speaking of speech as "mental dance" might reflect an
adapting of Pound, but I suspect it is rather his describing his own peculiar
kind of quasi-poetic speech and perhaps, although not necessarily,
thinking of a work in which "the scheme is like your rumba round me
garden" (309.7). There is considerable justification for speech as a
mental dance also among some of the symbolistes.

In fact when he speaks of "the dance of meaning" in _Cliche_, he
follows it with a quote from the _Wake_ (109.12-5). There are
discussions of these problems in my thesis with respect to Pound and
Joyce.

I sent the item off to The Boston Herald, but it probably won't get
used now that the action on the McVeigh affair has entered a new
stage. If they ever have the execution, just imagine how much that video-tape
would be worth. I can't imagine that it wouldn't get in more general
circulation.

Best.

Donald