[...]rphosis fact of nature* that understands bodies as inherent transformabilities, bodies as the great differentiators

integration cosmology --presume--> singular distinctiveness of minds ==> solipsism[= potentially absolute singularity of minds ==> fear that we will not recognize ourselves in our “own kind”; solipsism: ‘natural similarity of bodies =/=> a real community of spirit'] --multiculturalism--> spiritual: the locus of difference ==> theme of spiritual conversion
=/= bodily metamorphosis

(a traditional problem in the West:)
*how to connect and universalize*
individual substances are given, while relations have to be made
=/=
(Amerindian problem, and problem of ajayeb:)
*how to separate and particularize*
relations are given, while substances must be defined


transformation ==> nature <=/= creation
transference ==> culture <=/= invention

*culture = acculturation*
*exchange = transformation of a prior exchange event*
*to act = to response*

poiesis (creation/production/invention model of action ==> objectification: question of ‘documentation’ in art) =/= praxis (transformation/exchange/transfer model of action ==> subjectification: question of ‘what is/has changed?’)


story of “we had to steal fire from a divine father”
(god forbid the origin of our abilities be animal or queer)


mythology: a discourse on the given, the innate
myth: that which must be taken for granted


affinity and alliance --> exchange (amerindian)
parenthood --> creation/production (modern western)
-the “exchange” (=/= “parenthood”) that Viveiros de Castro talks about fits seamlessly with capitalism's free exchange of knowledge

warrior/shaman/artist --> conductors of perspectives


relative
relational

enmity: full-blown social relationship, extreme exchange

schema of difference

(Amazonian cosmology:) generic attributive proposition = cannibal proposition
==> self: gift of the other (=/= hylomorphism: an active usually exclusively human subject confronts an inert and naturalized object)

**cosmology (~ the hyphen between nature and society is social) =/= naturalism (~ relations between society and nature are natural)**

we are body-objects in ecological interaction with other body-forces

-question for Viveiros de Castro: what would be then the “exchange” between Amerindian perspectivism and Western naturalism? (not only that “we” should learn from Amerindian perspectivism but) what they can learn from us?

European ontology: unextended thought and extended matter (--> Iron Man)
going from questions of representation --to--> questions of ontology
simplification of ontology (--> objects pacified and silenced) ==> complication of epistemology (--> subjects proliferate and chatter) [--> “discursive practices” and “politics of knowledge” are results of that pacification?]

***someone must be wrong, something has to be explained*** (<--?-- we have never been modern, they has ever been primitive)

(Viveiros de Castro)
formerly, savages mistook (their) representations for (our) reality; now, we mistake (our) representations for (other people's) reality. rumor has it we have even be mistaking (our) representations for (our) reality when we “occidentalize”


*culturalism, relativism, textualism --> reduces reality to representation
*cognitivism, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology --> reduces representation to reality

it has been obvious (for more than seventy-five years) that at the heart of the matter, there is no stuff; only form, only relation

...................................

“ajayeb” a term i use inclusively to examine a living and nonliving ‘historical site’ / ‘heritage web’ in order to learn/talk/speculate about what counts as writing ~= writing technologies ==> production of knowledges

(Katie King's) bits of pastpresent, a tool for scale making
~(Weston's) time claims
[*pastpresent: decline epistemologically charged purifications that devout complaints of “presentism” mandate]

-in my research (willing and required to become a beginner) i am asking: why past and present are so easy to separate?
(~~--> how our vision of past and future creates our present?)
==> directions, spinning dynamics,

in a sense my work on ajayeb is a critique of “presentism"[= overvaluing historically and culturally local constructions of the meaning and importance of a particular set of stories and their conditions of production (of “ours”). (for example the “future” story)]
-->? speculative presentisms (Dinshaw's queer historiography)

*globalization: “that travelogue of distributed, heterogeneous, linked, sociotechnical circulations that craft the world as a net called the global” (Haraway)
~= processes responsible for the power and mobility of media, money, politics, sexualities, and knowledge practices*** --> these meanings and powers can be “glocalized”: altered, filled in, indigenized, and reunderstood *within local agencies*(: people, art forms, practices of everyday life)
(globalization processes) ==> academically uncomfortable and sometimes politically reprehensible سزاوار سرزنش forms of hybrid histories

(Katie King's flexible knowledges:) layers of locals and globals

my aim in my research is creating *struggle for understanding* [= many communities involved in reading, writing, interpreting,] --> ***we are all members in these communities struggling for understanding***

Urton paying attention to decompiling intermediaty positions between so-calles reading and writing --> string records --> numerical accounts or maps or... ==> histories and narratives

my research on ajayeb in apass as a practice is about *disassembling and reordering classifications we use to access pasts*


the excursion i did in Vladmir's block was somehow about examining sites of implicitly or explicitly knowledge production in commercialized forms
museum, TV documentry as a metaphor {a richly contaminated set of crafty metaphors and realities} and narrative frame, a momentary melding of pastpresents in imaginative reenactment --> economic globalization figuring in artistic/academic capitalism
(--> ajayeb is also of this kind,) *site of heritage* culture as promoting particular versions of history, nation, science, art, and religion*** --> (the excursion made me) with ajayeb to be careful with ‘the commerce with global knowledge production’ --(what is at stake)--> structure of pasts, peoples, and sensation
*heritage culture ==(impress)==> public histories* --> appropriation of national and personal identities; today (specially in university) no one is “immune from governing pressures of heritage culture or the impression of corporate management assumptions, styles, funding requirements, and money-making imperatives in enterprise culture” (Katie King > Morley & Robins) [i can imagine apass is struggling with this specially in Brussels]
(@Vera's position as a museum tour guide, exploitations of the interpreter/reenactors, who are promised semiprofessional recognition within social historical practice but instead end up as engineers of a “feel good” atmosphere for tourism)
(Katie King > Slaughter & Leslie) *global market:
•fields “close to the market” --(reguire)--> proucts
•fields “peripheral to the market” --(are pushed to)--> pedagogy and public service
(sometimes virtually indistinguishable:) impulse to democratize ~=? commodify knowledge
-they model for museum goers as:
◦reenactors
◦shadows
◦witnesses
◦a play at being “there”:
◾on set
◾on site
◾in that past
◾in a past:
◽mentally enacting
◽reenacting
◽experimenting
◽speculating
◽trying to find evidence for various pastpresents


TV camera: like a historical source, arbitrarily selects what it chooses to show, never lies and never understands (Kopkins)

TV documentry's “distributed agencies”: neither [director and screenwriter] can claim priority without wraping a description of these productive processes, and neither can make the TV product without the essential interaction of many people's hands, minds, tools, skills, tasks, objects, and infrastructures --> these distributed agencies (with problems and possibilities) are also necessary in art research ([Katie King:] and in scholarly knowledge production), (building, creating, constructing, laboring means to learn how to become sensative to the contrary requirements, to the exigencies اقتضا, to the pressures of conflicting agencies where none of them is really in command; Latour)
‘industrial model of distributed production’ <--> ‘a version of the responsibilities and pleasures of professional and intellectual autonomy’
-TV shows are animated with folks from our time who invite audience identification as “us”: we are the viewers mentally enacting [~ playing at, reenacting, experimenting, speculating, trying to provide evidence for] various understandings of the so-called past***
melodramas of reenactment and experimentation ==> professional knowledges are elevated, while their bondaries threatend

in the production of an ‘object’ things (and meanings) get lost, they might be registered in “interference”


*anachronism, anachronistic --> #sleep-walking
“slippages in time” within the past as well as between “us” and the past
desire for tales of progress, with some particular “us” on top ~ chronology as essential origin {what we see often in technology tales such as Lucy (2014) or X-Men opening scenes}=/= to mix up who counts as “us” {what i have been trying to do, mixing up with Iran, Germany, etc.} to offer different timescales
•local details that animate generalizations
•archival labors dramatized and experienced as immediacy
•transparency of the material limitations of selection


spectacle of production

critique of the living-history ethos

giving science war pep talks... [TED]
(don't!)


[*]witnessing: “root of the experimental life”

[*]science: important and witnessable

freestanding photo-figures of scientists that work to situate and create scales of importance

commenting and making alliances across space-time with other figures


_[audience and markets]_
audience polyphony
audience and markets shift and converge in [flexible knowledges] complex address of multiple audiences, in that contradictory nest of niche political and epistemological “markets”
(**the story of the ‘interactive’:) “rich contradictory nestings permit an require visitors to select among possible salient narratives by animating differently layers of locals and globals”


to call oneself in and out of allience and its classifications, that *momentary universalism* shades into other ranges of affiliation and disaffiliation (*)

[...] --> [ ? ] --> salience --> tangible --> literal --> experimental

...................................

conceptualize the intensities of form and force
affect studies has made me feel less alone because before it

...................................

There are [always] other epic and epochal forces in our midst.

...................................

evil eye --> دیو چشم زخم --> غش --> اغشی

...................................

باغ plethora of old and new humanities, selves - with Sardar: There are plants that provide various colors of foliage, or hedges and borders, or climb up fences, or play architectural roles (=/= presumption that we must have a identity & supposition that we discover our identity & the Socratic “know thyself” as a fundamental human urge) we exist with multiple identities invoked differently in different context. subscribed to an imagined “heritage” ready to kill and be killed to save some “essence” (=/= San'an)
sake of the difference, scum and finest of men
(for example “black”: to be confused: once excluded, now technically empowered, a dominant group in the rainbow, but still practically marginalised by the history that created and continues to operate practical exclusion.)
@Iranians: how much of the Other is actually located within me?
“a perfectly permissible aspiration” --into--> “an instrument of war” (Maalouf)
British identity is based on an assumption of authority that makes the world a familiar place, a proper theatre in which to continue being British. #Olearius
exclude the (unsavoury) foreigners <==> romanticised history and frozen tradition
*history as a deliberate human creation ==> acknowledgement of a common past ==> (a difference called) identity [= “our” similarity against “their” difference,] (submerging, barbarising and differentiating itself from another identity) [for example ancient Greece + Rome + Christianity = Europe] ==> monolith ==> conflict and death
•my (jub جوب) gutter photos =/= Tehran's Americanization of the high street.
•my photos of Rima =/= her selfie's merchandised model of individualism
a deep desire for association
various and diverse traditions ==> identity: “the means to synthesise similarity through difference and to see difference as discrete means of expressing basic similarity” (Sardar)
“balance of similarities and differences as a way of locating what it is that makes life worth living and what connects us with the rest of the changing world”
*...continuation of the Enlightenment project of progress through instrumental science. One source of Truth, and one Civilization, continues in its trajectory
garden =/= {North America's arrogance in cosmological proportion as worlded in Hollywood, and science seeing itself as the only manifestation of reality, The Platonic idea that truth is same for everyone}

...................................

[body politics]

Greeks --> body politics --> elaborated images for human society ==> citizen, city

(Haraway on) the junction of natural forces and economic progress in the formative years of capitalist industrialism

(Haraway's emphasize and telling stories about the) union of the political and the physiological

ancient and modern justifications --> differences (seen as natural, given, inescapable ==>) as *moral*

the ‘content’ as well as the soicla function of science --> renderd utopian: (that means) we leave this central, legitimating body of skill and knowledge to undermine our efforts
[we must fight with all our power against utopian(~= dystopian) stories of science ~-> accepting that there are natural objects (bodies) separate from social relations] --> (we must refuse) the damaging distinction between pure and applied science & double ideology of firm scientific objectivity and mere personal subjectivity

we have granted science the role of a *fetish*: an object human beings make only to forget their role in creating it

...agreeing that “nature” is our enemy and that we must control our “natural” bodies (by techniques given us by biomedical science) at all costs to enter the hallowed kingdom of the cultural body politic as defined by liberal (and radical) theories of political economy

[a traditional reduction of the body:] Freud --> (a theory of body politics:) “culture in the cost of sex” [<-- no!] : human social developement = progressive domination of nature (particularly of human sexual energies) --> *sex as danger and as nature* are central to Freud's system
*** Freud (, Brown, and Firestone) are useful tools in a dissection of the theories of the political and physiological organs of the body politic because they all begin their explanations with sexuality, add a dynamic of culturla repression, and then attempt to liberate again the personal and collective body

civilization = body politic

(in iran:)
personal body =/= social body }--> both not natural

(a fundamental human condition:) through labor, we make ourselves individually and collectively in a constant interaction with all that has not yet been humanized ♥


[animal body politic]
[the science of animal]
animal sociology (in fables since millennia [--> Kelile Demne stories of natural basis of cultural cooperation and competition]):
•construction of oppressive theories of the body political
•science of animal groups
•a tool in the reproduction of world
•enhancing material power

*animals* (played an importan role in)
•the project of human engineering: the project of design and management of human material for efficient, rational functioning in a scientifically ordered society (or in belief communities)
--> animals were/are:
1- plastic raw material of knowledge (subject to exact laboratory discipline)
2- having special status as natural objects that can show people their origin [--> Attenborough's civilizer films], and therefore their prerational, premanagement, precultural essence
***animal societies have been extensively employed in rationalization and naturalization of the oppressive orders of domination in the human body politic***
3- naturalization of patriarchal division of authority in the body politic and in reduction of the body politic to sexual physiology [--> Tehran's mice cannibalistic libido]

--> animal science of the body [<-- is important for everyone]
we might free nature in freeing ourselves

become aware of “fallacies of the claim to objectivity” and not to “permit facile (باسانى قابل اجرا) rejection of scientific discipline”

we cannot dismiss the layers of domination in the science of animal groups as a film of unfortunate bias or ideology that can be peeled off the healthobjective strata of knowledge below



if you are not freeing others, in freeing yourself, your freedom is total bullshit
(Sina)


for him intelligence is the perfect expression of evolutionary position ==> experimental comparative psychology --> intelligence test --> species, racila, and individual qualities were fundamentally tied to the central index of intelligence

#merchant
*entrepreneur in primate studies* --> (merchant seeing himself) working to foster a rational society based on science and preserved from old ignorance


[transformation of human sex into a scientific problem]
-trading sex for “privilege”:
primate intelligence --allowed--> sexual states --stimulate--> the beginnings of human concepts of social right and privilege

physiology <--economic--> politics }--> scientifically confirmed to life at the organic base of civilization

sex-linked differences,
the primacy of sex in organic and social processes,
scientific managers over women's lives


monkey and apes as:
•natural objects
•unobscured by culture
•organic base in relation to which culture emerged
--> *human engineering*

(Haraway naming those) scientific networks crucially determined who did science and what science was considered good
(#sohrevardi)

Darwinian conception of natural political economy of population


(in Attar, Kelile Demne, Ajayeb, i am hunting for) *** early systems theory *** --> providing the technical base for (different claims such as:) the claim to scientific maturity of the social sciences based on concepts of culture and social group


“he removed the putative head from the collective animal body.” --> animal body politic
--> society was derived from complex interactions of pairs of individuals, understood and measured by psychological techniques, which constituted the social field space. one looked for axes of dominance as organizing principles on both the physiological and psychological levels
--> the theory of the function of male dominance nicely joins the political economy aspect of the study of animal behavior and evolution:
•competition
•division of labor
•resources allocation model
with the social integration aspect:
•cooperative coordination through leadership and social position
with the purely physiological understanding of reproductive and embryological phenomena


*Garden of Industry*

dominance as a natural property (with a physical-chemical base)

a cross ideological exercise (is not possible): science cannot be reclaimed for liberating purposes by simply reinterpreting observations or changing terminology --> (Princess Bubblegum) denying a dialectical interaction with the animals in the project of self-creation through scientific labor

(let's switch to a deeper look at primates, not as models of human beings, rather:) how they live and relate to their environment in ways that may have little to do with us [this is so helpful for everyone and is why i am interested in animal body politics] and that will surely reform our sense of relation to nature in our theories of the body politic [--> #body image]
-bodies and societies that do not depend on dominance hierarchies
--> [my work with ajayeb bestiary early animal science is about learning] ***how to build natural sciences to underpin new relations with the world*** [and that ‘history’ is not like something you hand it to someone like a cake you baked]

...................................

قورباغه زدن با شلنگ بیرون پریدن گلوله قرمز
مورچه روی برگ روی آب
آجر پرتاب کردن گربه بالای درخت
مورچه سوزاندن با ذره‌بین
سوسک سوزاندن با آب داغ
جوجه ته چاه



heyvan, heyvun, heyvunak, heyvunaki
حیوان، حیوون، حیوانک، حیوونکی

...................................

(delight in) our *sensous involvement* with the *materials of language* (Lyn Hejinian)

Doty

all we see is slippery, nuanced, elusive

***“the world is wily, and doesn't want to be caught”*** (Susan Mitchell)

perception is simultaneous and layered

(elements of the) sensorium: continuous, comples response to things perpetually delivered by the senses, the encompassing sphere that is such a large part of our subjectivity

we are englobed entirely (by the reports of our senses) --> a seamless weft of ‘information’(=/= the data the senses offer)

dark, suggestive blur of shapes and colors

what we can take in is a partial rendering of the world

[dog's nose reading] ...a universe of scents--historical, multifaceted--presents itself to the canine “reader”

(Doty) ...deer cannot see red or orange, a biologist writes, but apparently can see blue much better that we can. who can even imagine what that would mean, for blue to be--well, more? ♥

“All accounts, it seems, are partial; thus all perception might be said to be tentative (versuchsweise), an opportunity for interpretation, a guessing game.”

Doty putting it into a single sentence in order to suggest, as Proust did, the simultaneity of perception. he [Proust] wanted to dilate the sentence toward its outer limit, so that one would feel the blu of space and time that the unit of syntax held all at once

*finding the words* --> the nature of my attention, the signature of my selfhood

...terms commensurate with the clamoring world

(recognize your acts of naming --> for example naming the sonic outruch of a bird “singing”) --> what birds are actually up to when they sing isn't clear **

Whitman describing the sea itself as a “fierce old mother” whose constant iteration is the whispered word death


(in Iran we have) the problem of speechlessness (~->? Mehdi and Kourosh's talkativeness) ~= a state without agency --> unable to push back at things that impress upon them

***life not having been realy lived until it is narrated (@Ehsan)
(we need) to experience the satisfaction of matching words to the world --> **to feel, at least for a moment, language clicking into place, into a relation with the world that feels seamless and inevitable** -- when language seems to match experience, a kind of fusion between the word and the world : some tift is healed --> “the silken skilled *transremembrance* of a song” -[trans- : exchange of parts, one being fusing with another] --> “floating instant"--a part of the other, grown indistinguishable

the pleasure of recognizing a described world [****] --> work on ajayeb


festidious sense of accuracy


(Doty on) Elizabeth Bishop's poem “The Fish” (concerned with the experience of observing, aiming to track the pathways of scrutiny, *carefully rendered model of an engaged mind ar work*, looking into the fish's shifting eyes that can't be comfortably anthropomorphized. we can only guess if the poet is concerned with defeat, vitory, or survival) =/= Ferdosi's Rostam, or Div
Bishop's examination of the fish happening in the composition of the poem =/= straightforward record of perception

a tradition of seeking, in the vast book of difference (tha American continent offers)

(the poem) interprets a wordless, creaturely presence

baroque: attempt to dramatize the mind in action rather than in repose (Sa'di's baroque tendencies in Golestan)

fusing impressions synesthetically in a startling phrase
peeling scales provoke simile

...mind moving swiftly from observation to reverie

a compelling replica of inquiry ==> enlist the reader's participation in a version of the work of consciousness


descriptive acts --> attempt to render the world (and it is subject to revision)


*examplars of strangeness” (for my ajayeb, #writing Div descriptions)
-let's rewrite Div Sefid and give it more *wealth of detail*==> keeps the Div from becoming a symbol and allows it to *remain creaturely*
#Div poetry, to get close to a lived texture of creature, to allow the senses their complexity synthetic life

**every achieved poem inscribes a perceptual signature in the world**

the work of seeing ==> who is doing the looking, a specific, idiosyncratic sensibility

*detail ==> subjectivity* : we are brought into intimate proximity to the slipstream of (her) sensations --> *subjectivity* is made of such detail (of all the ways in which the world impresses itself upon us --> knowing through our scaffoldings of concerns, the tones and shadings of our moods) ~~--> we are in a sort of *readerly alliance*


[time]
#practice: try to describe what subjective time feels like --> to find variety of verbs to describe less readily chartable motions
(the time of interiority) pools, cibstricts, tunbles, speeds
-we live in a felt narrative progression, through which experience is transformed into memory
*memory edits*
what is memory but a story about how we have lived?
-timelessness: the interior landscape of reverie


lyric state of mind : seized by a moment that suddenly seems edgeless, unbounded
-wholly giving oneself over to experiencing an object
-unpointed awareness
-perfectly useless concentration
-entirely occupied
lyric moment is isolate =/= (parts of a) narrative are contiguous
(according to the lyric -->) consciousness or immortality is without date(?)

moment dilates as it is described
creating an alternate sense of duration


the surface of language
the complexity and interest of the surface

thickness means we have to *labor to enunciate* them -- is a way of mirroring the physicality of the world

seamlessness ==> our attention is suspended

(a poem/writing) shift time ==> put us inside a scene

...slip the confines of the body

poem's leap toward transcendence

people slip out of the story they are living all the time (@iranians)
(daily life is full of small moments of:)
•rupture
•disappearance
•interiority

because of her [Bishop's poem The Fish] act of description ==> her encounter with otherness restructures her sense of the world ***
(for Bishop) animal presence engenders an experience of joy
(the animal presence provokes, engenders what in Attar?)


-our speech rushes in where there are no words

ajayebnameh --> our acts of description --> bridges to animal life and evidence of our distance from them


descriptions (actually?) describe the consciousness
various and lusterous enough (to reflect back the complexities of the) self that is doing the looking

description: a mode of thinking
=/= that would make a claim about what reality is }--> that is why i can't read theoretical philosophy about the “real” or “being” anymore (of Simondon for instance), the lack of *description of the speaker's world* in his work [--✕--> every leaf is made up of a complex interaction of shades] --> (is this because i studied drawing?): people who have studied drawing know that *you have little idea what is in front of you* (in the visual landscape)
***what philosophy does to your mode of perception?

‘chain of definitions,’ a catalog of names --?--> a mode of *litany* [مناجات وعبادت تهليل دار (تحلیل دار), colloquy with God (--> #prayer, modes of consciousness and rhetorics used to commune with the divine =/=? “building a tower in order to thunder back at the old thunderer” -Doty)] (--> this has been my mode of consciousness in my lectures)--> a way of accumulating terms of praise (can also easily grow numbing)
*accumulation of descriptive phrases*: a dynamic, forward-moving thing, one that includes evidence of struggle -->[*connection lies behind the “catalog of inadequate terms”*]
(one effect of my quirky talks is as if we have) climbed a ladder of phrases
...struggle to reconcile the delights of earth with the demands of heaven* [_i am keeping in touch with a way of talking (doubling phrases,,,) in performances which intensifies the audience's sense of the speaker's character, his enthusiasm, his giddy متزلزل pleasure in being overcome by what is (for him) the *sensory evidence* (of the divine, or an excessive described world)]
(in my performances) through description, twining strands of meaning, braiding together elements of [my] thinking and perception to make an image both elusive and unforgettable, unparaphrasable نقل بيان نشدنی
*density* ==> melds perception with thinking and feeling ==> making a new generative reality
(the speed of my talking has to do with the quick and compressed that) operates on us before we have even had time to think about what is happening ~=> a world that is both immediate and immense, a moment out of context, a pouring stream of being (on the way so somewhere else) [a viscerality that Vanja reported after experiencing my performance; my #routines]
-when you look at my performances there is a feeling of it is not quite figured out how he is yet, there is no settled mastery on its way, rather, there is a restless experimentation, a trying on of different densities (of meanings, letters, spoken energies, etc.), various surfaces, degrees of busyness and calm --> how to look at this kind of work?
(we don't need anymore art like this: as if they have been made on secret, and *their radicalism lends them a sort of urgency* [<-- no no!], a perpetual quality of surprise)
-my imaginal portals: to invoke an inviting world of associations, a scented cool, ~ an indirect way of naming (=/= to program language : reducing language to a debasing perceptual shorthand)
-proposing ‘it is’ by placing another beside it, cultivating opposition and tension


“something understood” --> left open, undefined, ...


(Elen's “je suis” [Ich bin] in her images and...)


(with the help of Janina, we are) madly in love with the surface of the world

@Marialena; transmembering power of the sea, nautical daryayi دريايي، مربوط به دریانوردی، ملوانی



saying what ‘you’ see & saying why you ‘see’

the more accurate and sensory the apparent evocation of things, the more we have the sense of someone there doing the looking (<-- USA spectacle knows this)


X in Y's translation


“a fish never makes an aesthetic mistake” --> it sends us hurrying to every visual image of fish we can think of, to see if it could be true*

(a good) description: an evocation of the sensory world also suggests the limitations of such evoking, maintaining a sort of open space
in which meaning isn't closed or completed, but remains instead generative


a title sometimes does the useful work of placing us specifically, so that the body of the poem can turn its attention to the heart of the matter

(it is surprising how strongly the) naming of particulars ==(bring color into)==> poem's (or text's) perceptual web


distortion's power to suggest but not define linkage
•the use of ‘like’ --> would draw a firm line between the two elements
•not using ‘like’ --> no firm gesture of equivalence ==> we confront a metaphor that is far more alive in its associations, far more ambiguous, and more crucial --> both an evocation of alienation and a recognition of communality --tonally--> composed of *equal portions of sorrow and wonder* --> forcing us *to remain in the position of interpreter* of something that is perpetually open =/= direct statement


Blake (and Attar?) wouldn't be the great poet he is if he could allow his bloom to be entirely symbol
--> a bloom attached to the speaker, a memeber of Lord Death's troops, an assistant to[...]