THE MIRROR OF THE MUSE
written poetry as stepping stone in the rational consciousness
containing the content in the format

versification of consciousness
is barlines in the field of thought

enjambment in the ordinary places
gave rise to dovetailed (devotional) reasoning

Poetry was the art of dividing speech and thought.
We had to measure rhythm and flow
before we could measure logic and structure.
The act of organizing thoughts into commonplaces
was the first "atomic notes" movement,
and it ended up being that a decentralized bard
won out over individual machinations.

The Muses sung through the voice of the discourse.
Iron sharpens iron.
Counting beats and hearing rhyme forced a process
of translation according to rules without
inherent denotative semantics.
Connotative semantics became the name of the game,
and musical grammar was the ministerium.

The consciousness organized around that which it could remember.
Remember:
memory (Mnemosyne)
was the mother
of the nine Muses.

The transcription of the poem is the emulation
of a collective stream of consciousness.

Where poetry today fails is that it is not
faithful discourse within any connotative space,
and so cannot capture the richness of what is said.
The word lives and dies as ink, not flesh.
And accordingly, there is no resurrection.

The deliberate use of space
seems to me to be what makes manuscript culture
(kept alive and well by highlighter girls)
into such a unique medium.
We could even say that the thread of poetry
has only managed to penetrate to the current day
through manuscript, not factoscript.
(Is it the art or the artisan that speaks?)
The typed word is still not listening to itself.
It has not properly seen itself from the outside,
despite its many weird trips.
Collegiate insight never carried forward.

The above is a faithful transcription of a note I wrote down, seeking to preserve the spirit of its freeform formatting.

I tend to find that when writing by hand, I pay more attention to the natural "breath" of the words than I do when I type. And even the breath in the handwritten word is but a pale imitation of the natural meter of everyday speech.

It is often said that writing notes by hand is better for learning than typing notes out, but I wonder if that would change if students took notes in, say, Microsoft Paint. They would have to write down words as images which could be moved around freely on a fixed canvas, and so need to consider the space in which they are reasoning and reacting.

Perhaps the "issues" with the typed word are just the usual issues that come from lack of constraint. And yet, are not constraints easy to add on? Of course, constraints feel arbitrary when they are not enforced by the medium. And this, in practice, is why poetry is always found in the authentic struggle against the information technologies of the day.