Fugue #72

Let’s talk about how that applies in the context of today’s literature.

Rhythms repeat. (And echo off our minds’ back walls.) Point, counterpoint...

We aren’t ATOMS, we’re MOLECULES. We emerge as parts of communities and networks. Webs of simultaneous narratives, the din of which, at a certain remove, becomes a pleasant hum.

Back to Frost...he insists that poetry requires complete freedom to move about in and establish relations within the material - regardless of time or space. (WE ARE EVERYWHERE.)

Seriously, here we go:

"The artist must value himself as he snatches a thing from some previous order in time and space into a new order with not so much as ligature clinging to it of the old place where it was organic."

He’s right, and he’s wrong. Right about the need for freedom to REecontextualize influences, but wrong about the need to DEcontextualize them. There is simply no way to remove all the ligatures - all the sticky details of context that necessarily affect the meaning of the material. We take the material with its context in tact, and use it for our own purposes...sometimes because of, but often despite that context.