While checking my counter, I also glanced at my latest mathemaku. When I made it, I thought what it was saying was transparently simple. This time, though, I realized that maybe "the invention of error" might be considered close to hermetic by some. That in turn made me think of Wallace Stevens, and the fact that in order to get many of his best poems, one had to have a background in his outlook on life. I immediately went taxonomaniacal, dividing poets into those with standard, and those with non-standard outlooks on life. Off the top of my head, it seems to me just about no poet--Blake and one or two other oddballs--had a non-standard outlook on life, for his time, until the twentieth century. The outlooks of some, like the Elizabethans, have since their time turned non-standard.

Ortho-Notional Poets and Idio-Notional Poets. Yow, two new Grummanisms. I guess I must be genuinely be back. Silly terms, no doubt, but useful in differentiating popular poets from shunned poets. I think Frost was Ortho-Notional. That's doesn't mean his view of existence was the only standard one. It seems to me it was the standard down-to-earth, conservative, common-sensical, pessimistic one. Again, off the top of my head. Pound was idio-notional, Eliot ortho-notionalistic--but idio-stylistic.

I'm idio-notional throughout my latest mathemaku. I hope an engagent knowing little about my outlook will find the idea of error's being invented intriguing, and find a way to the idea that its invention was an important, very positive event in the creation of civilization--or spring from winter. In my private outlook, error is a sloppy synonym for "non-conformity," "creativity," "change," "individualism," "differentiation," "the unexpected," "the opposite of homogenization." It makes debate possible. It also makes war inevitable, something I toyed with making my poem say. War is the ultimate error, and therefore--in the long term--the ultimate good. Competition as opposed to stagnation.

Is all that, in the final analysis, ortho-notionalistic? I'm not sure. There's the problem that no outlook can be original or unique. I think it useful to agree that some are enough off the norm to count as idio-notional, though.

Note: a main reason I managed this post is that I had the day off from subbing. I also had two APC's in me, due to a headache, so I'm feeling kinda not bad.

I'm somewhat bothered by its being just one more twist of one of my oft-repeated themes, and that I have so few central themes. That Stevens had no more cheers me, though.

For a better, larger reproduction of the piece, click here.