leaf-encrypted no;
                    and Poem, distributed
                    through seven wherefores

                    Poem, leaning south
                    near where an abandoned blue
                    semi-colon talled.

                    The after halted,
                    its best rhyme with Poem's hopes
                    filged and atticless.
     
                    

Okay, here's a complete rough draft of my thoughts on:

The Biological Value of Poetry

The biological value (i.e., value for survival) of language as a form of enhanced communication is too obvious to go into. Poetry is a form of language whose biological value should also be obvious, yet to many people it is not. I have found several ways that it contributes to the survival, and world-dominance, of our species.

1. Nature has given an ability to make it to some of us, and an ability to appreciate it (as poetry) to many of us, because of its unique ability to communicate the emotional affect of existence. Consider, for example, what it can and does do for sexual reproduction. It allows potential mates better to reveal themselves and how they feel about each other--and the fitness to reproduce that their skill with and appreciation of words, and general intelligence, their use of their own and/or others' poetry reveals. At the same time, it adds value to courtship and the sex act through its lexical decoration of them. It has the same value for friendship and like alliances. It even contributes toward effective international relationships by revealing nations to each other as potential mates. I am much more likely, for example, to help my nation productively trade with Japan than go to war with it because of its poetry (however little I may understand it the way the Japanese do). Finally, poetry can add to our knowledge of existence in a way not other form of communiction can, thus helping us make maximally effective use of it. Science can better tell us certain things about the value of swamps, say, than any other form of communication, but we may not fully accept it because of what it can't tell us about that value that poetry, and only poetry, can. Either science or poetry alone may not be enough; both together can be (or will be once man has advanced a bit more evolutionarily).

2. My theory of aesthetics is simple: that which is familiar but not too familiar causes us to experience cerebral pleasure (as opposed to somatic pleasure, such as the pleasure of satisfied thirst, which is the only other kind). If something is too familiar, it becomes boring, which causes cerebral pain, the same thing caused by the insufficiently familiar. One point needs emphasis: context is crucially important: an unfamiliar discord in a song will not necessarily cause pain if its context is familiar, nor will a maddeningly over-familiar musical phrase in a song if the rest of the song is unfamiliar enough--"fresh" enough, as most would say; nor will a familiar phrase in an aggravatingly unfamiliar song necessarily cause pleasure. One other point: by "familiar" I really mean "expected in context by the brain"; "unfamiliar" would be "not sufficiently expected by the brain in context; "over-familiar," "too expected in context by the brain." My theory describes how the brain determines this, something I may bet into later.

I bring up aesthetics, because the most important biological function of poetry, or any other art is to provide aesthetic pleasure: direct aesthetic pleasure, by which I mean (mostly) fundaceptual pleasure, or sensory, visceral or musculosensory pleasure. (I know there's a better word for the last but can't just now bring it to mind.) The result of a poetic image of a sunset that works, for instance.

If we put aside biological considerations, I think few would disagree that, for those capable of appreciating it, poetry is good simply because it makes such people happy. But why shouldn't anything that makes us happy be of biological value, too? Simply because happiness gives us something to live for, to fight to defend?

But happiness is medically valuable--the opposite of stress. One's body, during happiness, operates smoothly, in the familiarity causing the happiness. It knows what to do, so does it without trouble. The happy person relaxes into a calm during which repairs can take place, and a degree of rest.

Moreover, one person's happiness can increase group happiness and effectiveness. Cohesiveness, too, as happy people tend to share or try to share their happiness. A poetry that gives pleasure to an entire group will have an especially positive psychological affect on the group--which is all to the good biologically, for the group and individuals in it. The pleasure of the poetry can help get those capable of experiencing it through bad times, too.

3. Poetry has at least one more primary biological virtue: its ability to revitalize the language. That, in turn, must revitalize thinking processes. If you think of the language as a sort of map of reality, poetry is what mostly puts new routes in it, breaks people out of standard, unproductive routes and thinking, dislocates them into discovering escape routes that get them near new data. Relatedly, poetry is difficult to make. Because some people do appreciate it, Nature selects for an ability to create it (for some very small percentage of the species, at any rate). In selecting for it, Nature inescapably selects, too, for over-all language ability, which poets may use outside their art, but more likely will pass on to descendants perhaps not able to make poetry but better able to use language in other ways. Ditto, Nature's selection of the ability to appreciate poetry in a not small percentage of the species.

One additional thought: that poetry (and the arts in general) acts admirably as science's needed foe. That is, it prevents scientific clarity and rationality from a dominance which will lead to stagnation. Science and philosophy and similar disciplines will be beneficial in the same manner to poetry and the arts in general, similarly preventing them from a dominance which would lead in the opposite direct, to chaos.

I'm reasonably satisfied with the ideas expressed in the preceding, but think my organization of them needs work. No doubt I awkward close to incoherence at times, too. I rarely write anything of much length without doing that, at least in drafts. Meanwhile, I can't seem to unclutter into more about "Sonnet 18," particularly its meter, which I've been thinking about but not writing about for four or more days. Having boiled away from my in-depth survey of the poem's repenation.