Mapping Lightning, and other comments

I plan to work with the Lightning is a Yellow Fork for my mapping project. I originally wanted to make a website--a sort of hypertext maze of links (for what better place is there than Cyberspace to create this type of matrix?), through which I could explore the "blooming" effect of the poem and define certain branches of it. I'm not sure how feasible this idea is, because what I envision: a grand network of pages, each with an individual video, interactive game, animations, and other stimulating effects that would represent a venturing onto a particular branch, is far from what I can realistically create. My bank of web-design skills is meager. But my bank of video editing skills is slightly less in the red, so I think I'll pursue mapping through a video medium after all.

I want to first explore the literal meaning of the poem, and show something suggestive of figures dining up in heaven, a fork and other eating utensils tumbling down from the sky, images of lightning blending into the tines on a silver fork. I also want to relate the idea of lightning, electricity, and divinity to the brain. The lynch-pin would be the idea of existence. From a biological perspective, which may or may not be more reliable (but is certainly best supported by the limits of our sensing systems), everything we conceive is based on electricity, the impulses of sparks, quarks. I can't help but bind the light in the sky to the light that forks through the human brain, both elementally identical, both a signal, a glimpse into the secrets of existence and the way things operate--from the macroscopic (the Universe) to the microscopic (the Brain or Mind).

Here is what a mapping of my current mental map of a poem (a mapping of an idea in another's mind itself) looks like:




More to come, including a detailed breakdown of what and why I placed things where they are in the current view, which in itself entails a deeper explanation or exploration of this particular branch I've chosen to hop on.

--UPDATE--

My main goal was to explore (and demonstrate the result of which) the various manifestations of electricity--in the sky, in the mind, and in the heavens--both as a physical and conceptual projection. And following naturally from the idea of the heavens is the idea of existence and the systems of thought that humans devise in order to understand life, and indeed, in order to "live."

The prevailing background (moving) image is, of course, of a lightning storm, the sound effects of which I added and synchronized separately. I liked the grainy low-contrast black and white quality of the storm footage because it helped fashion a heavier--stormier--mood, and also creates a tone of electrical disturbance and buzz that courses throughout the brain. The mechanism of the heavens, like that of the mind ("the black box"), is one of the greatest natural mysteries, and the lack of film clarity helps illustrate this fact.

I synchronized the first rumbles of thunder with flashes of neuronal cells and the tines of a fork, instead of lightning. It was striking to me, even more so than I had predicted, how the images I found of neurons superimposed so well onto images of lightning; extended branching are key characteristics of both, and perhaps this form in the neuron is a consequence of accommodating the natural tendency of lightning to bifurcate iteratively. The lightning is a yellow fork, and so is its medium (I suppose you could call the neuron that), except the "tables" for neurons would be the brain itself, and the "cutlery" dropped thoughts themselves, evidence of neuronal actions, as lightning is evidence of movement in the heavens (take it scientifically and deem this activity to be electrical current/collision of charged particles, or take it philosophically and deem it the wrath of god, or perhaps the wink of some supernatural eye).

I had a white house flying in from the upper corner of the sky/viewing frame as the voice recording moved into the part of the poem describing "mansions" in the sky. The curtains flutter in some imperceptible breeze (God's breath? Your own breath that drives the conductance of electricity down dendritic spines?), mysterious and ominous in the shadows they cast (depending on what associations you might have with that image), yet bright and alluring at the same time; you want to enter the house of those potentially "awful" figures in the sky/you want to investigate the gears that drive existence, but entrance beyond those gates may preclude return--indeed, the billowing of the curtains insinuate a motion driven by a movement from presence to absence. The arched window off to the side is, furthermore, reminiscent of a cathedral window, bringing into the frame a monumental construct for human consciousness: religion. Around this time, one can hear a low, sustained Gregorian monk chant emerge from the tails of the poetry reading, as well as the overtone layer of Islamic prayer song. Religious systems evolve around one concept, and merge in harmony, a declaration of consciousness, a consequence of consciousness, and the final query of human existence.

Throughout most of the moving image, I have overlayed two tracks--one of neuronal "chirping" (electrical activity transcribed into sound; our cells are singing to each other!!) and the other a continuous electrical buzz. These represent the sound of information transmission carried on within and without our bodies. All the while, this clip is transferring information directly to you, as well as indirectly, via the presentation of recordings of information transmission.

I also recorded myself reading several lines from Hart Crane's "The Tunnel," a poem in which the author delves into the underground (the ventral face of heaven:its reflection:its evil twin), using the subway (another electrically-powered vehicle) to course through projections aimed from the back of his mind--frightening, dark images of Poe, gritty urban life, loneliness, the night. The lines are barely audible under the audio layers already present, but represent nonetheless, another point of entry into this exploration of existence and electrical projection of images as evidence of thought. I love exploring audio, and will definitely be playing around more with ways of tickling the aural pathway in future projects.

Anne Stevenson on Art

I recently attended a "Lunch with Honors" session with poet and UM alumna Anne Stevenson. I found the talk pertinent to what we had discussed in class earlier that week (Ezra Pound's poetic principles), particularly as she listed her own three principles of poetic creation (presumably inherited from Elizabeth Bishop): accuracy, spontaneity, and mystery. For comparison, Pound's three principles, as stated in his essay, were: direct treatment of the subject/object, to use no unnecessary word (is this the same thing as conciseness? doesn't one lose something by being too concise?), and to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase (i suppose this means to treat poetry as music, to make the words come alive in all dimensions, starting with acoustics). I thought Stevenson's principles were frankly easier to understand (perhaps that was because she was there to explain it in person), even though some of them coincided with Pound's. They both seem to stress the value of knowing exactly what it is that one is writing about ("accuracy" and "direct treatment") and to present it in an honest fashion; does this also agree with Pound's statement that no word should be superfluous--for if one is addressing a specific subject, would dressing it up in unnecessary words be an act of dishonesty? Would it be kind of analogous to (modern day) rap music--its value found solely in phonetic flow, and lacking substance? Is music enough to count as substance in poetry? Does it really matter what the words are saying as long as they invoke some visceral response? Is that the final goal of art? Or is it useless unless it's cognitively provocative? I found the last of Stevenson's principles to be vague and a bit troubling: "mystery." A poem must not be too explicit, else it grow incestuously obvious to the reader, was what I gleaned from her statement. Isn't this irresponsible, to purposefully try to veil your work from the audience's understanding? But I also do agree that poems lose much of their beauty and power when they become too obvious. Does Pound's insistence on conciseness also entail obviousness? No, because as long as the writer knows what he or she is doing with each word, the construction of the poem is still purposeful and unoccluded by mere distractions, figures placed here and there for reasons not even understood by the author himself. And another one of Stevenson's principles also contrasts with Pound's (or what I understand to be Pound's) doctrine; she values spontaneity in her poetry. While this does impart a freshness to the work, is it really at its best stage after you first work through it? I guess Kerouac took it to the extreme when he refused to give any of his poems a second glance, published them all as they were right after conception. While that does offer an invaluable snapshot into his creative process, sometimes work needs to be revised over and over again (like the mapping project for this class) as more material accumulates in the brain. Stevenson also stated in her talk that "poetry is not logic. Above all, it is about emotions." I used to use visceral tension as a gauge for the quality of a poem, but I've begun to reprocess that thought; isn't it a little cheap to ride on emotion alone? A little too easy? Sure, the transcription, time-encapsulation of emotion is extraordinarily resonant, but I keep feeling like there is something else...Harold Bloom writes in his essay, "The Art of Reading Poetry," that the highest form of poetry should invoke a sense of "strangess" of being. Provocation. Innovation. These take a large reservoir of creative resources to remain faithful to. Is it really true that if you have nothing new to say, you shouldn't say it at all?

She also brought up another interesting topic that relates in a way to the artist's duty (what is it, exactly?). She discussed the state of modern poetry and its movement away from traditional forms into more and more formless products, and perhaps consequently more and more nebulous products that fail in large part to capture either music or meaning. Writing can serve as therapy for the writer, but though these pieces can sometimes resonate on a short wavelength, true art serves as therapy itself, resonating, dislodging, breaking apart something in the brain stem or soul, allowing for regeneration, re-creation, and blooming.

Collections

In the first statement of your interview with Silken, you remarked on the necessity of collecting to creation. This reminded me of something Harold Bloom wrote in his essay, “The Art of Reading Poetry,” that the first step in the appreciation of a poetic piece is to commit it to memory—to know at least on a sensory or aesthetic level the bends and inflections (the sulci and gyri) of its acoustics, the way the words fall upon the page, the texture of its particular patterns, and the reactions, visceral, cerebral, and otherwise, this body of information invokes in you. The body itself is in fact a collection that becomes amalgamated into the matrix of the mind. From there, the poem becomes a recollection, absorbed into recollections of other poems, experiences, thoughts: something quite alive, and evolving as the database is updated. The poem is essentially digested and emerges through an anabolic process something more fully incorporated into, perhaps even providing sustenance for your own system. For example, I commit Hart Crane’s “Voyages II” to memory. This is one way of knowing the poem: though I do not know it on a cerebral level yet (perhaps my reasoning faculties are not developed well enough, the semantic background of my education not broad enough either, my life experience limited), I can come to some understanding of it just by folding it into my memory and allowing it to distort the plane, the matrices of my mind. The poem is then ripe for fermentation, my memory a cellar. I can reach for it, uncork it, and rebottle it with new information/collections, leave it to set again. This rather obscure correlation seems incoherent on a purely logical level, but makes sense, at least to me, in an intuitive sense. Moving forward to the question of what “tethers” the concept of/word “collection” activates for me: collection and memory are necessarily bound to one another, for memory is a collection, and collections must be remembered in order to have any significance. I’m sometimes ignorant of direct sensory perceptions and the physical world in general (a grade of myopia, in a way), so that what I recall is not the sensation itself but the reactions it provokes—usually a particular aura or feeling, or if it is indeed sensory, a smell. Collections of olfactory sensations bear the strongest associative ties to other recollections, such as places, people, or a certain time.