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May 7: Gotta restate yet again a point I seem obsessed with making, although I don't really making very often: the ability to carry out act X effectively depends on having three things: enough of the right kind of intelligence, enough physical strength, and enough emotional desire. Most people don't count the last of these, but if you lack it, you have no more ability to carry out act X than you would if you lacked enough intelligence or enough physical strength.
Where does the desire come from? I say, from the same place the other two come from, your genes. Not that you would have genes that made you desire to do act x, but that your genes would make it unlikely that you wouldn't want to do it, or something very close to it, at some time in your life. So, if you make poem X, it would be because you had the mental and physical equipment necessary to make it, and a desire to work with words the way a poet does--because you have a good verbal intelligence that made using it pleasurable, and enticed you to use it more and more, and ever-more complexly and risk-takingly.
Next up, the beginning of another mathemaku. Geof Huth's fidgetglyphs, which I'm now calling "calligraglyphs" (which he considers a grotesque coinage), got me thinking about calligraphy in poetry. Visualizing a long division making use of calligraphy, I saw a Calder mobile. That made me want to do one, but I couldn't think of words to go with it. Eventually, I came up with the ones in the piece below--whereupon I no longer saw much point in the mobile aspect of the piece, but consider the fancy script important, albeit not essential, to it.
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This is, among other things, a celebration of grammar, which strikes me as odd. Most people think of it as boring, and imprisoning. For me, it's a glorious door into connected understandings not available to the pre-grammatical. Which reminds me of another observation I've been wanting to make. It's about abstract words. Every word denotes something, so a non-representational word (which is what I mean here by "abstract word") is impossible. So, I consider words strung outside a grammar-dictated order are abstract, or non-representational words. "Tin river sew limber" would be an example. No matter those would would triumphantly force some meaning on it. Whatever they came up with will inevitably be subjective and therefore not a communicable meaning, so not representational in any rational sense. Which may well be a plus in certain kinds of poetry, and has been, I think.
More about my mathemaku, which I think I will call, "Mathemaku in Homage to Grammar," as I work on it. I have what I think is a great idea for its background, and for what my subdivision product, which will be purely graphic, will do with that background, but it will take a while to work that out.
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