Poetics

Thoughts on poetry, language and history.

Preliminary dogmatism: Homer is poetry, poetry is Homer, that is all you know, on 'Parnassus' and all you need to know.

Our thoughts posted on many boards radiate out into the energy fields beyond the earth, the pattern of the waves carries them onward and outward. I think these patterns could be decoded, the bits and bytes retrieved, so that these utterances are permanent, writing the 'akashic' record which will be read on the day the judgment. But that is every day, every hour, every minute, every nanosecond of 'mortal' time unfolding.

I think about what needs to be written, what would be helpful or interesting (mostly I avoid writing). Many people have a need of emotional self-expression and do that very well, but I try to avoid it. I've been told on good authority that 'The feeling creates the form.' So feeling, emotions are the driving energy -- what form will they create. I see emotional self-expression as throwing energy into formlessness, even if it is a poem that rhymes.

I think there is a way to learn how to write poetry, there's a science associated with it. It's necessary to have something to say, but we all have something to say, and feeling is the starting-point.

I'm trying to recapture my childhood, and re-do my education. What textbooks to use, what discipline to maintain. It begins with the study of Latin, as a paradigm, inflected language. It must not be made boring, no good unless the child falls in love with the subject. If he loves books too much, he must be made to exercise, here too he must love the assignments. The child is autistic (Asperger's) can't play team sports, can't bear the presence of most other children. He walks in the woods with his tutor and learns the names of plants and their medicinal properities (a bit of folk medicine here) digs and plants in the garden and learns the other plants, the domesticated ones.

So Latin, with thoroughness, but not too much of it, for it's mainly preparation for the main course of study, the language and poetry of Homer in his original 'dialect'.

The curriculum follows the seven liberal arts of Martianus Capella, which were the foundation of the Cathedral Schools of Charlemagne -- namely grammar, rhetoric and logic (the three 'linguistic' sciences of the Trivium), and arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (the four mathematical sciences of the Quadrivium).

So the formulation might be: Charlemagne leavened by Comenius, Pestalozzi, Steiner and Montessori.

The sequence of learning languages is: Latin, Greek, German, French, English -- the first four as a foundation for understanding our own language.

'Enough for today.'

continuation --

Advice to myself: Know what you want to conceal, and why, know what you want to reveal, and how much or how clearly.

W. 'Whatever can be said can be said clearly.'

B. 'I know I could say this clearly, but I prefer not to.'