Snacks or full meals! --eat, consume, and help Native Americans!
Thank you!
Showing posts with label main course. Show all posts
Showing posts with label main course. Show all posts
Saturday, December 28, 2013
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Lucretius of puddle wow!
This is what Thylias Moss had to say about, in a nutshell, existence as a collaborative venture, about a shallow puddle being able to reflect the depth of an atmospheric ocean, about a partnership between compression and expansion, each taking the other into itself apparently simultaneously, perception determining which parameter dominates --the partnership is a flaw perhaps, an accident perhaps, my own weakness for the idea, but it functions well (my perception) as a source, somehow, of possibility:
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Here's another take on Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler:
And here's an opportunity to view without leaving this page, flamingos and Irish step dancers in parallel movement in proximity:
(I'm relying on movement clips available on you tube though had flamingos and Irish steppers been filmed to show the parallels, similarities would be more intense courtesy the exaggeration that accompanies focus --even so, groundwork, the root of the link is here.)
________________________________________________________________________________________
It is possibility that I want, and it is possible for me to imagine as many possibilities as I'd like to
--each one a tine of a limited fork, each one also a negative tine, the space between prongs, of a limited fork. Yes, this fork in my hand --further limited for the interaction and collaboration with my hand to access, at best, part of something itself part of something;
the fork that my arm extends by holding it, part of the system of limited fork access; I grasp what grasps. Pasta winds around the prongs, white ropes. I remember my mother wringing white sheets into twists that become, I'm sure of this, the twists of a white turban, an albino hive from which I'd have to extract a very funny honey --I assume that I could not resist extracting that strange, so even more desirable honey, any more than I could resist this movement, this journey from the winding of pasta to rare honey, a destination
becoming inevitable for honey in this nutshell (there are others simultaneously) being cracked here. It happened with socks in The Monday Aardvark of Laundry, and the following video is honey extracted from the larger hive of a poem that, like the universe it is, admits to containing what it contains, some glorious spots, some in danger, threatened and threatening, stable and unstable, the range of real. The structure holds, however briefly, but these junctures happened; the pasta, turban, hive formed something my mind could hold and nurture --that structure ever holds for any amount of time on any scale in any location, though this happens every moment, the moment itself a structure held and holding, amazes and delights me --what does this study of interacting systemsalso reveal? A dependency on delight (perhaps why there is, as
Joel Brouwer puts it in his review, an "allergy to editing," which happens, which is inevitable, Joel, erosion, variables and forces that nudge stable systems toward instability, unstable systems towards instability. While this dies, this thrives. Multiple locations of simultaneous activity [not synchronized necessarily]. That is the footprint of a landscape of existence. A landscape to which I hope to be true (as I perceive that, perceptions updated as often as I become aware that updates are necessary, though probably not often enough). Here is a model of a landscape of existence worth trying: John Conways' Game of Life).
Some of the mappings of the Tarzan Holler, of the Tokyo Butter can be (forms of) brutal, won't avail themselves of a certain kind of denial, do not boost certain kinds of reputation above attempts to perceive better the irregularities and all, her own too, the ordered messiness of movement, of existence that seems to be going somewhere, a point of movement, a rejection of pointlessness, mindless wandering (the mind indeed! --please, if you have a mind to, refer to My Neurological Winter).
- Posted using BlogPress from my Limited Forked iPad
POET'S PICK APRIL 5
Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
Selected by Thylias Moss
National Poetry Month 2007
Letter from the Editors
Dear Readers,
Our thanks to Thylias Moss for today's special Poet's Pick!
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Editors
Thylias Moss's Poetry Month Pick, April 4, 2007
from On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura), Book One
(with some reference in my comment to a passage in Book four)
by Lucretius (c. 99 - c. 55 BCE)
as translated by Anthony M. Esolen
Now it's clear that nothing can be limited
Without something beyond for boundary, some
Point beyond which our sense can't follow it.
But you must admit that nothing exists beyond
This All; therefore it has no limit, no end.
Nor does it matter in what place you stand:
Take any point you like—you leave the whole
Unbounded in all regions equally.
A few lines later, this comes:
…I’ll follow you then; wherever
You place the shores, I ask, "What of the spear?
Where does it fly?" No end can be established;
Immensity prolongs the flight forever.
A passage that has followed, as has the other, this:
There's more: Nature dissolves all things into
Their atoms; things can't die back down to nothing.
…Never can things revert to nothingness!
Thylias Moss Comments:
How tempting to believe in innovation, in the poet making something new—I have needed this delusion myself, have in fact built something I dare call a "new literary paradigm" on the possibility of the new, yet one of the ancients had already made clear (in Latin) that "as all words share one alphabet, many things may be made from the same atoms," must be made from the same particles, hinting at some irreducible particle that exists in a finite number of basic forms, these combining to make all else, infinite variety within limits established by the nature of these particles, so human beings will not (in initial birth form) become an Andean peak or a pack of flamingos dancing in one of the rivers, perhaps a sulfurous one, at the feet of the Andes though some humans may do an
Irish step dance in which the legwork seems to invent the flamingo ritual pack dance again—could it be that certain patterns are inevitable given the close relationship between all stuff? We're made of elements repeating throughout an immensity available on every scale, Lucretius instructing his readers to venture to the shore, to the limit of existence and from that shore to throw a spear that will still travel away from the thrower, will still
have somewhere to go, every somewhere a candidate for the center in a totality that is necessarily endless if it is indeed an all, and if endless, then centerless, as much space in every direction from every point. Wow. And looking, he says, into a puddle seemingly shallow gives access to a depth, to an infinity as immense as the celestial one that the puddle is able to hold. Wow2 (superscript in the original message) and Wow2 (subscript in the original message).
So beginning with any of these points, taking any point as a nucleus, and increasing distance from it while maintaining that speck as the center, eventually, the periphery embraces totality. And that is the powers of ten, an Eames film I saw in Chicago, the stills from the film that I have as a flipbook, the book about the size of things in the universe that I have taught when I invented a literary theory that caused me to seek that which could give my new point credence. I have reinvented something ancient, it turns out. I participate in one of the inevitable patterns, am part of a chain of observing the limits and joys of the senses, the logic and marvels suggested by
consideration of scale. And I am comforted by Lucretius' love of what I consider lovable paradox, to be both bound and unbound, both finite and limitless. And I am comforted by Lucretius saying that recycling is the nature of things, not waste. There is no throwaway stuff (including ancient texts—how I need Lucretius!) for stuff breaks down into basic units that are then free to form something else, to be part of something else that can also be the center of everything, and by extension, exist in some form for as long as there is totality, as long as there is existence as both the container and the content.
This is how to live, and it has been the way to live at least since Lucretius. From the center where I (re)configure a way to make whatever forms are possible out of various components; from this center, I arrive at a totality that as it widens away from my ideas embraces Lucretius, his part larger for being wider—but my idea therefore a
candidate for potency, for being a distillation: a potent drop at a present end of the funnel. I cannot resist another Wow!
About Thylias Moss:
Thylias Moss is the author of eight previous volumes of poetry. Her Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler was a National Critics Book Circle Award finalist, and was named by the Village Voice as one of "Our Favorite Books of 1998." A 1996 Fellow of the MacArthur Foundation and a recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award, Moss has received grants from, among others, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Kenan Charitable Trust. She is Professor of English and Art & Design at the University of Michigan.
Don't forget! If you enjoy our regular features and special events like this one, please join Thylias Moss in supporting Poetry Daily by making a tax-deductible contribution.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Here's another take on Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler:
Last Chance for the Tarzan HollerBob Holman
by Thylias Moss
(Persea Books: 1998) Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler is Thylias Moss's sixth book, her first after grabbing one of the MacArthur genius grants. Her work has changed -- moved further out, encyclopedia-ized. She has memories of playing jacks sans hands, Thalidomide-esque, but all it is is nose-sucking, all it is is the end of the world. The Brothers Grimm, Zora Neale Hurston, Amy Clampitt, Stanley Crouch: this is a thin volume, but spectacularly dense, provocative (is her cheating poem about Lazurus “cheating” death? or her and her husband's affairs?). To read her Susan Smith / baptizing poem is to be horrified -- yet, as Moss posits, 'tis poetry's job. The long, more formal open-field works, particulately “Advice,” “Sour Milk,” and the title poem, all break new ground. I want the book! I want the movie! paperback
And here's an opportunity to view without leaving this page, flamingos and Irish step dancers in parallel movement in proximity:
(I'm relying on movement clips available on you tube though had flamingos and Irish steppers been filmed to show the parallels, similarities would be more intense courtesy the exaggeration that accompanies focus --even so, groundwork, the root of the link is here.)
________________________________________________________________________________________
It is possibility that I want, and it is possible for me to imagine as many possibilities as I'd like to
--each one a tine of a limited fork, each one also a negative tine, the space between prongs, of a limited fork. Yes, this fork in my hand --further limited for the interaction and collaboration with my hand to access, at best, part of something itself part of something;
the fork that my arm extends by holding it, part of the system of limited fork access; I grasp what grasps. Pasta winds around the prongs, white ropes. I remember my mother wringing white sheets into twists that become, I'm sure of this, the twists of a white turban, an albino hive from which I'd have to extract a very funny honey --I assume that I could not resist extracting that strange, so even more desirable honey, any more than I could resist this movement, this journey from the winding of pasta to rare honey, a destination
becoming inevitable for honey in this nutshell (there are others simultaneously) being cracked here. It happened with socks in The Monday Aardvark of Laundry, and the following video is honey extracted from the larger hive of a poem that, like the universe it is, admits to containing what it contains, some glorious spots, some in danger, threatened and threatening, stable and unstable, the range of real. The structure holds, however briefly, but these junctures happened; the pasta, turban, hive formed something my mind could hold and nurture --that structure ever holds for any amount of time on any scale in any location, though this happens every moment, the moment itself a structure held and holding, amazes and delights me --what does this study of interacting systemsalso reveal? A dependency on delight (perhaps why there is, as
Joel Brouwer puts it in his review, an "allergy to editing," which happens, which is inevitable, Joel, erosion, variables and forces that nudge stable systems toward instability, unstable systems towards instability. While this dies, this thrives. Multiple locations of simultaneous activity [not synchronized necessarily]. That is the footprint of a landscape of existence. A landscape to which I hope to be true (as I perceive that, perceptions updated as often as I become aware that updates are necessary, though probably not often enough). Here is a model of a landscape of existence worth trying: John Conways' Game of Life).
Some of the mappings of the Tarzan Holler, of the Tokyo Butter can be (forms of) brutal, won't avail themselves of a certain kind of denial, do not boost certain kinds of reputation above attempts to perceive better the irregularities and all, her own too, the ordered messiness of movement, of existence that seems to be going somewhere, a point of movement, a rejection of pointlessness, mindless wandering (the mind indeed! --please, if you have a mind to, refer to My Neurological Winter).
- Posted using BlogPress from my Limited Forked iPad
Location:Everywhere in the universe!
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Slavery (more legacies of)
Slavery was (is) so much like what has happened (is) happening with credit now --to credit and to citizens. Credit card companies own (most) of us. Every day, my inboxes fill with offers to provide me with credit scores, and/or additional cards. Switch! (I'm encouraged).
To speed up shopping, link a card to your account, tap and go! Meanwhile, those at the top are getting richer and richer, and those at the bottom seem to get poorer and poorer, resulting in a vanishing middle class. The gap between the top and the bottom is widening --I hope you like what you're born into, because moving out of one designation and entering another will be difficult (at best).
As I write this, I'm recalling when (some, not all) women got the right to vote --not as impressive to me, perhaps because of (some of) slavery's legacy: seemed just right for women, from that tradition, as women (from that tradition) had always worked --after all, slavery was an (economic) path to getting labor done --an economic path with racial barometers and barriers.
For enjoyment, I read When They Were Girls; the they included Clara Barton and, a personal favorite: Susan B. Anthony. Perhaps because of my father's pale coloring, that book was magical to me, anything that applied to him, I figured (still do) also applied to me, but I was wrong (still wrong) about that. I failed to understand that Susan might not be working on my behalf. She (in pictures I'd seen) and my father were a similar color --they looked the same.
I come from a household in which my mother and father always worked, so it was not strange to me to be left at home, alone, while adults worked --no matter the job, I was left to my own devices, usually reading and writing till my parents returned. I started writing at age six. The legal right for women to vote was granted in my mother's country (also mine) in 1920, via the nineteenth amendment to the US constitution. But as a woman of color, she had to wait longer to exercise that right. Slavery, in essence, was extended (even to now --in many ways). Post-reconstruction America, was not a hospitable place for the variety of citizens (still true, especially if animals are included --it's their planet, too) that lived here, then and that live here now.
Please read more about the USA's history of low tolerance for racial equality here: (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2957.html). Read more about some of the history of black exclusion from home ownership via exclusion from bank loans here: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage_discrimination).
--such reading can help to change a mind (such as mine) about affirmative action (which has probably) helped me, and is probably still helping me: as I think about policies based on (or rooted in) medical discrimination, especially against those with physical and/or mental abnormalities and/or anomalies. While not at the bottom, I don't believe (except for perhaps in remembering --no more mental math team for me, I guess!)
I am not at the bottom, either. I can still both teach and write, but with more compassion for those excluded from these ranks. I am a better person (seems better to me) because of what I've survived, and the ways in which this survival is manifesting itself. (--would be better, perhaps, if not for the banks.)
I do feel enslaved to banks --and to credit card companies (who really own me). My car is mine, however, paid for in its entirety (but, being a 2004 Nissan, the car does require maintenance, that I must pay for --often with a credit card, so until that amount is paid off, I suppose I don't really own my car --and as balances get too low for the lien holders, I get offers to go into more debt, possibilities of reverse mortgages, etc. (now that the house is nearly paid for) and a general lack of empowerment for me who is not a corporate leader, who owns no valuable stock, and who is not invited to the meetings where decisions are made. I pass nothing on any sides of tables (but I do have to report injuries, --my prior medical conditions-- when asked by companies about to make some decisions I'll have to try to live with --oh my numbered days!)
There was a time after slavery ended when blacks still had no rights, still lived without any real ownership of their lives, couldn't make legal decisions that would be upheld wherever they went --even within the country, south to north, east to west, etc. (Still a problem for the bi/multiracial and the gays & lesbians in various parts of the world.) Religions have made acceptance more difficult, not easier. It seems logical, for instance, to construct a brown Jesus. Would He not be the color that people from that part of the world tend to be? Our recent enemies from Iran and Iraq? Brown --a dominant skin tone (darker than my own father). The most violent forms of aggression against minorities seem to have ended or seem to be ending. There will, likely as long as there are people, be pockets of violence filled with people who take out their fears and animosities on others. An end of aggression is not upon us, despite turning the other cheek. It seems likely that lynching was an outcome of an end of a terrible system that persisted in the new (not really that new) world longer than anywhere else --and now enslaves us all.
My maternal grandfather was murdered, perhaps lynched --this isn't talked about much; hardly ever mentioned. His absence has been felt; however. He is enigmatic; a person of imagination, not memory. And he is one of my antecedents. --I came here by way of shadow and absence-- Incredibly shadowy --as a lynched figure would have to be.
I am beholden to companies with lots of money, bank wads (--I know that Nene is rich, but I don't know Nene--), the ones really responsible for my having the stuff I consider mine (could be stolen at anytime --hope not, however). Some of it, I've had so long I no longer fear a corporation taking repossession of it (again: could be stolen at any rime, but then wouldn't be mine tom worry about theft might help get me off the grid where none of this would matter, including blogs and websites --where servers are maintained by others, including the corporation --what I consider my work depends on them).
The house (in need of repair), provided I can hold onto my job for (at least) another five years, will be ours (I've been married almost 40 years) --no more mortgage then! Some (all Jehovah's Witnesses) of my friends --one of whom would have made a superb French teacher, were not supposed to go to college because the world was supposed to end before their graduation --in the eighties. But the world is still here for now --I don't know for sure how long--who does; even those who claim to know have based this knowledge on human perception --which remains problematic.
For how much longer, no one can say with certainty (--this planet is as vulnerable as any other cosmic object); and right on Earth, we've got climate change and its effects (poor polar bears), those wayward asteroids and possibly a return of a comet that took out the dinosaurs (the Earth does indeed have some craters. Click on this link for a list, each item of which is also clickable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impact_craters_on_Earth). It shows, what I believe from what I was taught and what I've been exposed to (what I haven't been exposed to has not had an opportunity to influence me, but if LFT is correct, then such opportunities might have a chance to occur before what we believe is here --according to unreliable human perception-- is gone).
Of course, we are capable of annihilating ourselves (hydraulic fracturing may assist with a process of annihilation --but may not-- contribute to an ultimate demise that seems rather definite to me. I doubt that humanity will last forever (Limited Fork Theory is all about strategies of doubting; connections could be made in doubt as well as in affirmation). So far, lasting forever has not been a tendency of any terrestrial inhabitants --why would it/should it be different for humanity? For human beings? I don't think that we are special, no more so than anything else alive. Aren't we just parts of other species in a long chain of life? Chain is significant, I hope, calling to (some) minds those chain gangs --and a song by Sam Cooke, released on an album: Wonderful World --an album where the rights belong to (Cooke's first single for RCA):
The Corporation.
Clicking on this link (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_Gang_(song)) will take you to more info about the song. There are, of course, other songs about chains, but the focus is on the song named.
Click on this link (http://gerryspence.wordpress.com/category/corporate-slavery/) to read more about how we are corporate slaves --slavery that is a part of, it seems, citizenry (in this democracy --built-in slavery, built-in like appliances also made by corporations. One of the flaws of democracy, that many of us think of a form of (political --to differentiate it, as much as possible, further from religious) salvation. Our money does say: in God we trust.
Sharecropping
Quite an insidious system. You never own your little agricultural plot; takes an incredibly long time to buy off your family. You're encouraged to plant, plow, harvest, but progress is difficult (at best) to measure. This link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping takes you to more about sharecropping as Wikipedia reports it (I like how Wikipedia is an aggregate, relying on the knowledge and accountability of users --I see no reason not to trust this user-based system of info dissemination --I've been taught to trust the Bible and encyclopedias --Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, but one that constantly accepts info as info become available; it self-corrects, and expands, grows as humanity grows, --is as trustworthy as humanity is-- Wikipedia bifurcates, is a bit of LFT in action). Cotton enters here (again): the touch and feel. The fabric of our lives. Please visit http://www.lex97.com and watch the T-shirt skeletons movie, on the website: lex97 and on YouTube: the forkergirl channel.
- Posted using BlogPress from my Limited Forked iPad
Location:Michigan
Friday, May 27, 2011
Approaching THE Role of Art-Making and the Arts in the Research University with caution: a response to Universities in the Service of the Imagination
How well intended the event was, scientists, Deans, University Presidents, major award festooned Professors, some acknowledged and applauded, some anonymous in an audience that also included artists, makers, students, faculty, members of local and visiting communities, and others there to listen to a keynote address on a subject to which most of those present were already committed. I identified as one of the committed, entering Rackham Auditorium with skepticism in check; after all, I was a maker in a research university, connected to the arts engine (as fuel and as exhaust) hosting the event, and I indeed had a role as an audience member, but a role that changed almost immediately as the opening session began, my feet, legs, head, torso responding to irresistible music of The Gratitude Steel Band;
I danced in my seat to what turned out to be an enjoyable conventional role for the band: background music, organized sound to help focus time spent waiting for the speakers, entrance and exit music, pretty sonic bookends.
I liked this music, and entertained (some of the Gratitude Steel Band’s role of course was to entertain) ideas of allowing movement of my body to interact with the sound of Gratitude, to be sculpted and resculpted according to tempo, modulation, and rhythm more visibly, right up there on the stage, but knowing what happened to Whitney Houston, whose established role has been stage performance, when she wanted to respond more forcefully to Prince’s music at his concerts, I decided against possibly being taken to rehab where some of the role of art-making would be therapeutic.
I didn’t hide these simple involuntary rhythmic responses to Gratitude’s music, but responses were tamed; there was no Pentecostal context that couldn’t be over-ridden; no Baptist fervor to which I might respond in an ecstasy of salvation and a personal relationship with Jesus that makes my mother dance, that enables dancing with a Holy Ghost partner, as most other times, she needs a walker (or the return of my father after 30 years in the grave —she believes that's possible too). So there is power in vibrations pulsing through the body, temporarily regulating movements of components of body to these rhythms that are incredibly intimate, invisibly entering ears, tickling cilia, Holy tickling when God is vibrating in a sermon, in a gospel choir, in responses to calls from praying deacons and deaconesses. In those moments in which body and sound are linked, there is collaboration, one informing another, inciting another to more intensity to a peak preceding decline at which point feeling and memory have chances to prolong effects and to shape meanings, heart rate gradually decreasing, temperature dropping, little transparent pills of sweat evaporating into an atmosphere that was a component of host system of event, that atmosphere marked with evaporation. What was built dissipated, including a promise I’d built for the event, seduced by role, art-making, art, and research cozy in the same sentence, not even separated by commas in the printed program. Members of the same family, royal cousins marrying (distant) cousins to keep their elite advantage elite, exclusive; side-by-side on a research throne.
The Role should have alerted me more quickly than it did; perhaps I was too caught up in hope that I was configuring with my own ideas about art-making, art, and research interfaces, hope that I also knew to function as an intangible snare that can exert enormous power because it often wrangles spirit, mind which many consider the throne of thinking, creativity, and imagination. But I knew to question knowing, so I slid comfortably into that hope,
accepting my role in accepting what was to be offered about the role. Before long, after listening to speakers validate art-making and the arts through art’s ability to produce and maintain cultural relevance, through art-making and the arts exercising of the senses, and through art-making and the arts’ key roles as connections that enable relationships between senses and mind, and between senses and imagination, art-making and art outcomes as evidence, witnesses, and offspring of these relationships, it became necessary to reconfigure my expectations. Because of art-making and art’s association with creativity, almost considered, it seemed from the talks, co- and the only owners of creativity, as if all that is made (by humans in particular, in this role-establishing event) is not also created, as if create did not mean to make, initially without restriction on what is made or created, as if creativity no longer can or perhaps even should mean only a process of creative ability or a process of ability to make —anything. There, it’s true that art may be an outcome of such making, such creation, as anything else made may be. Art is not the only baby made as outcomes of making.
Science without creativity? without making anything? without any innovation? How to get ideas for an experiment? How to create something to research? To create a surgical procedure? To make prosthetics? The art of breast augmentation, the art-making of breast implants, the less common art of breast reduction (some geometry there, some parabolic hocus-pocus)? Creative writing and no other written forms may be considered forms of expression? Things can be created, can be made that are functional with or without an additional aesthetic classification (creating taxonomies? lexicons? dictionaries? evolutionary trees (phylogenetic trees) that both inform and beautify?) that would not necessarily be permanent or universal, beauty being variable, interpretable, shifting culturally, personally, etc., having definitions that are also made (lip plates, neck rings, manolo blahnik stilettos).
SOME LIVING BARBIES OF THE WORLD:
WOMAN WITH LIP PLATE DRINKING
JUXTAPOSED WITH X-RAY OF WOMAN'S FOOT IN SERVICE TO some of THE ART-MAKING OF FOOT BINDING AND some of THE ART OF UNBINDING THE FOOT so as to, in part, collaborate with more space.
Above: some economy of image; a visual poam.
I’m probably beating this point to the death of aesthetic quality: I am creating that death, taking responsibility for the quality of that death, making it in a piece of writing, that in order to be a poem, would necessarily offer a lesson in the economy of words, to quote the keynote speaker who expressed the value of poetry as a literary location where we learn the economy of words, a statement fraught with assumption that does not serve well a position of universities in service to imagination. Indeed, the talks, with a notable exception, were fraught with assumption, assumption that confined thinking to a relationship with that assumption, and a path that leads from that assumption to extensions of that assumption that go somewhere, yes; but only where that assumption can go; possibilities of that assumption, perhaps apparently infinite, but a limited infinity, infinite within a context based on assumption. This statement from the keynote speaker betrays a lack of imagination in defining poetry, in a failure to allow for a possibility of a more complex configuration of a system of poetry that is itself configurable; indeed, shockingly betrays, since the speaker decided to go there, proclaiming an embrace of poetry as an example of a university (she has the agency as president to represent one) caught in the act of serving imagination; rather shockingly betrays a lack of knowledge about existing and emerging forms of poetry (and suggests a lack of having entertained a possibility of emerging forms of poetry), a betrayal that is a form of disservice to imagination in its imposing on poetry, whether intentionally or not, a narrow and traditional configuration that apparently doesn’t advocate exploration or experimentation or innovation: three components of research. Most surprising and disappointing to me is how embedded in the statement is an assumption that poetry could be static, relatively unchanging so that the role assigned to it at some unspecified point in time (in order for assumption to have become a part of the speaker’s knowledge in which she has confidence so does not doubt the statement despite its lack of imagination) remains poetry’s role. Poetry’s, it would seem, unchanging and unchangeable role.
Because of poetry’s intense (but not exclusive) association with metaphor (a form of equation), poetry may be easily considered a reliable source for lexical comparisons and equivalences that even science might turn to when, say, a discovery is made in, say, Biochemistry, for which there might not already be in place a classification, an established reference for something new, something emerging, metaphor serving as placeholder, or a helper to introduce something new through linking it to something already familiar as a (temporary) point of reference. Metaphor offers a formula for comparison (a form of interaction) whose possibilities have not been exhausted if in service to possibilities of metaphor, those serving those possibilities delve beyond (created) confines of how that formula has been applied. Using the mind at all, whether performing complex mathematical computations or composing a sonata or slamming a poem in a bar, for instance, involves biochemical and electrical processes in the brain. That very brain that produces science also produces art-making, the arts, and imagination; the brain is in service to all of these, that mock mushy cauliflower of brain —metaphor alert!— is the throne which they occupy, share. Metaphor is able to anchor itself in both the known and the emerging, the dull and the lively simultaneously, offering dual lenses that offer more opportunities when those lenses are not identical, when they share something akin to left and right hemispheric flavors of a brain. It can maintain a foothold in the known (a kind of root system) while bifurcating into less known areas —as when, for instance,
SEM imagery reveals structures on scales for which existing terminology seems to suffer from temporary or apparent inexactitude, and metaphor helps, (perhaps temporarily) configure understanding through a link of new and unnamed with something known that apparently has (perhaps only superficially) similar features or structures or behaviors until such time as more is known about a discovery to render metaphor unnecessary except for aesthetic purposes that help transform science itself into its visual aesthetic potential or its sonic aesthetic potential or its tactile aesthetic potential without additional drawing or painting or rhyming or dancing: science itself may have aesthetic potential and value of its own.
Senses of anyone (scientists and strippers, for instance, or scientists who are strippers) can lead to pleasure and disgust, and encourage a seeking of what provides pleasure. Science is not exempt from pleasure-seeking. Entire industries depend on a love of pleasure-seeking and temporary pleasure-finding, that like hunger and satiation, tends to be cyclic, recurring, necessary for some success of capitalism. An initial look at what SEM imagery reveals invites visual associations, connections with what is already in a seer’s visual memory bank
(I am presuming visual ability and visual success; I am not addressing tactile modalities of engagement —please pardon the negligence— but in tactile engagement of images, there are still possibilities of identifying familiarity of structural interface with fingertips; I think of Touch the Universe, for instance, a book that makes meaningful cosmic structures through tactile engagement for the visually impaired)
—something familiar might be recognized, perhaps erroneously in a first encounter in which excitement’s role might not be well controlled, enabling cross-scale connections, maybe even identification of a structural icon that seems to repeat throughout existence on multiple scales —a basic unit of structure, a basic unit of structure available to host configurable meanings, an ability that is essentially collaborative. Of course I have assumptions of my own. I'm offering alternative assessment to that role and to that service than what was so narrowly presented and, accordingly, likely also narrowly considered.
Like many there, I too have interest in collaboration and attempt to make collaborative ventures a routine part of my practice (indeed; I believe that making collaborative ventures a routine part of practice is inevitable, inescapable, a default mode of existing as long as that existence and its components have contact with anything). Most speakers acknowledged interdisciplinarity, were champions of it, supporters of a predictable range of intellectual and aesthetic cross-pollination, that is to say, expected mergers, infusing science and engineering with various modalities of creative process: visual, sonic, tactile, moving, implying that: All will explore art-making and the arts, but without a corresponding demand for art-makers to infuse their practice with more intellectual accountability and protocols of good experimentation (which would include good documentation), some of which might parallel protocols of scientific experimentation or even extend and/or reconfigure what good experimentation can be as it too evolves. There also happens to be some polysyllabic tastiness in the word interdisciplinary; I delight in saying it, and perhaps others do too, after a while becoming enticed by some deliciousness of what happens to tongue, twice kissing backs of upper teeth to say it, a puff of air escaping as mouth purses around ter, and tongue hits a hi-hat palate —some pleasure can be mined there. And that can be enough: mouth and lip service, oral fixation of saying the interdisciplinary-it word daily, proudly, without any unexpected interdisciplinary action following. I say this because of a tendency to mine for rather predictable products; sciences elevating art-making through pairings of artists with scientists and engineers, those who can supply technical interfaces of discovery and breakthrough offering what is more likely to elude someone whose training has been limited to creative rigor rather than quantitative rigor, competing, some thing, systems of logic and insight.
Speaking the interdisciplinary system activated by speaking fork (a video illustrating an essay on Limited Fork Theory: and its offering of multiple ways of studying interacting systems):
Though perhaps unintentional, it did seem that a consensus among speakers (there was one notable exception) was that research components of the university were more likely to elevate and extend expectations of art-making and the arts, through finding ways of integrating (appreciation of) art-making and the arts (as conventionally defined) into research practices, art-making and the arts benefiting from this association, as if without this association, art-making and the arts might not take on a certain kind of heft, certain kind of consequence, certain kind of intellectual respect. Some art-makers do of course maintain infusions of intellectual accountability in their practice, but the role of art-making and the arts in the research university is not to be configured as a broadening of such infusions or an exploring of intellectual rigor of art-making, encouraging emergence of theories of both personal and general art-making based on, for instance, rigorous study of decisions made, outcomes of attempts, reconfigurations and revisions of questions being asked as emerging answers are evaluated, or as alternatives to having to have answers are both imagined and constructed, art-making process documented carefully and analyzed, perhaps exposing rules at work in process, and offering opportunities to vary those rules, to explore making according to variable rules of experiments in making —this to address accountability of any maker, and to help any maker develop a vocabulary for each instance of making practice. Reversal of flexibility given to science and engineering to find value in art-making and the arts was not given to art-making and the arts to find value in science and engineering as host of connection. It became clear just what was being designated savior (of art -making and the arts) and what was being designated (in need of being) saved. Science and engineering host, invite art-making and the arts to bring creative process into disciplines of science and engineering but art-making and the arts are not viewed as hosts of science and engineering, as providers of viable sources for, for example, conventional NSF fundable and career-making experiment configuration.
What is considered Creative Practice does not (have to [when/if it does]) depend on arbitrary gestures.
Art-making and the arts were too defined by most of the speakers for any other possibilities to emerge. Paths offered are well-established. Significant and historic trailblazers and their loyal scholar-followers have kept these paths paved and determined, sometimes to a point of rut-formation, a sentiment advanced by one of seven speakers who warned against excessive bowing to what has been canonized, and against fortresses of disciplinary silos (forms of Big Bad Wolves) that grow naturally out of internal organizational structures whose roots are dense. More fire from blazing new trails might burn away some of that density, however. In some of these silos, opportunities emerge that are labelled opportunities, such as interdisciplinary opportunities that, unfortunately depend on having divisions that a doctrine of silos creates and maintains. What would/could interdisciplinary studies try to merge if there no clear-cut separate disciplinary silos? These divisions are products of fantasies of silos. Remove fantasy barriers, and connections already present might have opportunity to emerge (become visible to those unable ti see them). Disciplinary silos and their resulting assumptions offer but one system of organization of information, but not a system of information organization that information being organized requires. There are other systems. This current approach to interdisciplinarity betrays itself by seeking to join the disciplines, by accepting the appropriateness of these divisions; interdisciplinarity seems to maintain a loyalty to those disciplines, so will form a seam where these junctures occur, a fault line where these interdisciplinary junctures are vulnerable and susceptible to rupture. Rather easy to rip apart or ignore by moving closer to the interior of a discipline rather than remaining on the boundaries where interaction is less easily avoided. Only those hired or assigned to boundary or fringe positions will commit to an interdisciplinary ideology that occupies boundaries and fringes with them. This is not an integrative approach that assumes information is already connected, and that encourages configurations and reconfigurations of these connections. It is not necessary to build an interdisciplinary bridge to link that which is already linked —throughout, not just on the fringes. Such bridges become necessary when disciplinary silos (and factories of disciplinary silos) have been built, and travel from one silo to another is impeded and perhaps even discouraged by the silos themselves and by associated perceived differences that feed a logic of division and separation. Perhaps a role of art-making and the arts can be some dismantling of silos. Perhaps some of a university’s service to imagination can be imagining a university without enforcement of those silos even though Rita Dove in her text poem comments on how erection of (disciplinary) silos does not protect those silos from metaphor, from art-making about the silos themselves; indeed, protection from metaphor fails in the first word, an uncertainty of like, an admitting of doubt, texture of possibility, encouragement of continuing a system of questioning, like what else? and what else? —not in a search for the definitive, but a search for likeness, a study of likeness, a study of an apparent inevitability of likeness should it turn out that there is a like equivalence for anything, for everything, etc.:
Silos
Like martial swans in spring paraded against the city sky’s
shabby blue, they were always too white and
suddenly there.
They were never fingers, never xylophones, although once
a stranger said they put him in mind of Pan’s pipes
and all the lost songs of Greece. But to the townspeople
they were like cigarettes, the smell chewy and bitter
like a field shorn of milkweed, or beer brewing, or
a fingernail scorched over a flame.
No, no, exclaimed the children. They’re a fresh packet of chalk,
dreading math work.
They were masculine toys. They were tall wishes. They
were the ribs of the modern world.
____________________________________________________________
Of course, there’s more art-making work that can be done upon investigating particular silos, particular circumstances of geography, climate, economy, etc. From what distance does this consideration of silos occur? As that distance changes, as various climates fluctuate, what can be said about particular silos that accounts for some implications of emerging configurable information? From which angles of consideration, etc. Silo uniformity or something else? Which town? Do sociological implications of silos vary from town to town? Small owner silos versus corporate silos? What of silo shadows? Light-interface silo shadows and economic-interface silo shadows, for instance? What happens to abandoned silos? What are circumstances of abandonment? Etc. Do these tall structures of certain towns scrape the sky well? What about other configurations of scraping sky, urban development, satellites, ozone layer, etc.
The role of art-making and the arts wasn’t configurable in silos of the speakers’ imagination. In those silos that were better entered with compression, not expansion of the mind, in their ability to implement rules of inclusion and exclusion without having to state the rules, I learned that every undergraduate has an opportunity for a meaningful encounter with art at Princeton, the nature of which was not defined, but as it is a meaningful encounter, it could be a singular event
(as opposed to a seeking of a way to integrate that heightened level of perception throughout a life, a student as an integrated person in whom information should mingle anyway, what is encountered across the disciplines converging in a single person, a single life, not a person with silos in the mind to prevent mingling of information from all sources);
a singular event that according to the speaker, exposes non-artist students to that heightened perception artists are known for
—heightened perception that non-artist students evidently wouldn't encounter in pursuit of their more practical majors and careers —heightened perception that a meteorologist wouldn’t need, that an archeologist would need, that a scientist (paleontologist/molecular biologist, etc.) studying genetic or evolutionary memory wouldn’t need in turning back on, genes that have gone dormant in an evolutionary journey from dinosaur to chicken, resulting in these rather imaginative living embryonic sculptures of Gallus gallus domesticus with elongated dinosaurian tails, beaks of jurassic-appropriate teeth, and every reason, from a current status of fossil evidence, to keep their feathers.
How much better this work will become once those researchers acquire that heightened perception all undergraduate students will encounter meaningfully at least once: a meaningful encounter. Certainly, nothing in the keynote address precluded undergraduate opportunities for multiple encounters, but heightened perception and heightened sensitivity to how words are used when applied outside of the speaker’s customary academic silo —pictures painted with words, sounds words make in translations from transmission to reception, some of it discordant to some ears, and textures of those translations, for instance— might help the speakers at the event better understand (or be able to notice them at all) rules at work in their configurations of research, art-making, and the arts, configurations they in all likelihood inherited, acquired, learned in institutions similar to the research institutions they now lead; configurations that neither research nor imagination helped them reconfigure into discoveries that are less likely, not impossible, but less likely to occur when art-making and the arts are perceived as that which (only) enriches society while scientific research performs, it is implied, some other role in society, something evidently more quantitatively significant because the research university can extend life-support (implying a need for such support to stave off certain kinds of death of art-making and the arts, or to resuscitate when death is either in progress or has just occurred, research, it is implied, being healthier and in a better position to save; indeed a [presumed superior] intellectual rigor of [scientific] research suggests and supports competency of the research university to save art-making and the arts, something policy-reconfigurations could render moot [rhymes with research loot]).
What was stated was open to these interpretations; configurations of the speakers’ words and ideas did not include limiting factors that could reduce emergence of interpretations such as what this response offers —variables that this response delivers could have been reduced though a revision of phrasing and a revision of thinking that is a parent of that phrasing, thinking also a parent of policy; a failure to anticipate such variables when preparing speeches and the keynote address was just not good science, a form of science, but not a good form —unacceptable is a lack of awareness of where those ideas and configuration of them into utterance was weak, allowing some sentiments expressed to be historical, obsolete or even, worse, irrelevant as they applied to forms of art-making and the arts that are not the exclusive forms practiced —just how much research of art-making and the arts was done by those speaking, those forming the policy behind the role of art-making and the arts in the research university that is in service to the imagination? Why so little imagination in how art-making and the arts and their role was configured? Silo syndrome.
So much stored grain to sustain existing diets with palatable comfort food.
I danced in my seat to what turned out to be an enjoyable conventional role for the band: background music, organized sound to help focus time spent waiting for the speakers, entrance and exit music, pretty sonic bookends.
I liked this music, and entertained (some of the Gratitude Steel Band’s role of course was to entertain) ideas of allowing movement of my body to interact with the sound of Gratitude, to be sculpted and resculpted according to tempo, modulation, and rhythm more visibly, right up there on the stage, but knowing what happened to Whitney Houston, whose established role has been stage performance, when she wanted to respond more forcefully to Prince’s music at his concerts, I decided against possibly being taken to rehab where some of the role of art-making would be therapeutic. I didn’t hide these simple involuntary rhythmic responses to Gratitude’s music, but responses were tamed; there was no Pentecostal context that couldn’t be over-ridden; no Baptist fervor to which I might respond in an ecstasy of salvation and a personal relationship with Jesus that makes my mother dance, that enables dancing with a Holy Ghost partner, as most other times, she needs a walker (or the return of my father after 30 years in the grave —she believes that's possible too). So there is power in vibrations pulsing through the body, temporarily regulating movements of components of body to these rhythms that are incredibly intimate, invisibly entering ears, tickling cilia, Holy tickling when God is vibrating in a sermon, in a gospel choir, in responses to calls from praying deacons and deaconesses. In those moments in which body and sound are linked, there is collaboration, one informing another, inciting another to more intensity to a peak preceding decline at which point feeling and memory have chances to prolong effects and to shape meanings, heart rate gradually decreasing, temperature dropping, little transparent pills of sweat evaporating into an atmosphere that was a component of host system of event, that atmosphere marked with evaporation. What was built dissipated, including a promise I’d built for the event, seduced by role, art-making, art, and research cozy in the same sentence, not even separated by commas in the printed program. Members of the same family, royal cousins marrying (distant) cousins to keep their elite advantage elite, exclusive; side-by-side on a research throne.
The Role should have alerted me more quickly than it did; perhaps I was too caught up in hope that I was configuring with my own ideas about art-making, art, and research interfaces, hope that I also knew to function as an intangible snare that can exert enormous power because it often wrangles spirit, mind which many consider the throne of thinking, creativity, and imagination. But I knew to question knowing, so I slid comfortably into that hope,
accepting my role in accepting what was to be offered about the role. Before long, after listening to speakers validate art-making and the arts through art’s ability to produce and maintain cultural relevance, through art-making and the arts exercising of the senses, and through art-making and the arts’ key roles as connections that enable relationships between senses and mind, and between senses and imagination, art-making and art outcomes as evidence, witnesses, and offspring of these relationships, it became necessary to reconfigure my expectations. Because of art-making and art’s association with creativity, almost considered, it seemed from the talks, co- and the only owners of creativity, as if all that is made (by humans in particular, in this role-establishing event) is not also created, as if create did not mean to make, initially without restriction on what is made or created, as if creativity no longer can or perhaps even should mean only a process of creative ability or a process of ability to make —anything. There, it’s true that art may be an outcome of such making, such creation, as anything else made may be. Art is not the only baby made as outcomes of making.
Science without creativity? without making anything? without any innovation? How to get ideas for an experiment? How to create something to research? To create a surgical procedure? To make prosthetics? The art of breast augmentation, the art-making of breast implants, the less common art of breast reduction (some geometry there, some parabolic hocus-pocus)? Creative writing and no other written forms may be considered forms of expression? Things can be created, can be made that are functional with or without an additional aesthetic classification (creating taxonomies? lexicons? dictionaries? evolutionary trees (phylogenetic trees) that both inform and beautify?) that would not necessarily be permanent or universal, beauty being variable, interpretable, shifting culturally, personally, etc., having definitions that are also made (lip plates, neck rings, manolo blahnik stilettos). SOME LIVING BARBIES OF THE WORLD:
WOMAN WITH LIP PLATE DRINKING
JUXTAPOSED WITH X-RAY OF WOMAN'S FOOT IN SERVICE TO some of THE ART-MAKING OF FOOT BINDING AND some of THE ART OF UNBINDING THE FOOT so as to, in part, collaborate with more space.
Above: some economy of image; a visual poam.
I’m probably beating this point to the death of aesthetic quality: I am creating that death, taking responsibility for the quality of that death, making it in a piece of writing, that in order to be a poem, would necessarily offer a lesson in the economy of words, to quote the keynote speaker who expressed the value of poetry as a literary location where we learn the economy of words, a statement fraught with assumption that does not serve well a position of universities in service to imagination. Indeed, the talks, with a notable exception, were fraught with assumption, assumption that confined thinking to a relationship with that assumption, and a path that leads from that assumption to extensions of that assumption that go somewhere, yes; but only where that assumption can go; possibilities of that assumption, perhaps apparently infinite, but a limited infinity, infinite within a context based on assumption. This statement from the keynote speaker betrays a lack of imagination in defining poetry, in a failure to allow for a possibility of a more complex configuration of a system of poetry that is itself configurable; indeed, shockingly betrays, since the speaker decided to go there, proclaiming an embrace of poetry as an example of a university (she has the agency as president to represent one) caught in the act of serving imagination; rather shockingly betrays a lack of knowledge about existing and emerging forms of poetry (and suggests a lack of having entertained a possibility of emerging forms of poetry), a betrayal that is a form of disservice to imagination in its imposing on poetry, whether intentionally or not, a narrow and traditional configuration that apparently doesn’t advocate exploration or experimentation or innovation: three components of research. Most surprising and disappointing to me is how embedded in the statement is an assumption that poetry could be static, relatively unchanging so that the role assigned to it at some unspecified point in time (in order for assumption to have become a part of the speaker’s knowledge in which she has confidence so does not doubt the statement despite its lack of imagination) remains poetry’s role. Poetry’s, it would seem, unchanging and unchangeable role.
Because of poetry’s intense (but not exclusive) association with metaphor (a form of equation), poetry may be easily considered a reliable source for lexical comparisons and equivalences that even science might turn to when, say, a discovery is made in, say, Biochemistry, for which there might not already be in place a classification, an established reference for something new, something emerging, metaphor serving as placeholder, or a helper to introduce something new through linking it to something already familiar as a (temporary) point of reference. Metaphor offers a formula for comparison (a form of interaction) whose possibilities have not been exhausted if in service to possibilities of metaphor, those serving those possibilities delve beyond (created) confines of how that formula has been applied. Using the mind at all, whether performing complex mathematical computations or composing a sonata or slamming a poem in a bar, for instance, involves biochemical and electrical processes in the brain. That very brain that produces science also produces art-making, the arts, and imagination; the brain is in service to all of these, that mock mushy cauliflower of brain —metaphor alert!— is the throne which they occupy, share. Metaphor is able to anchor itself in both the known and the emerging, the dull and the lively simultaneously, offering dual lenses that offer more opportunities when those lenses are not identical, when they share something akin to left and right hemispheric flavors of a brain. It can maintain a foothold in the known (a kind of root system) while bifurcating into less known areas —as when, for instance,
SEM imagery reveals structures on scales for which existing terminology seems to suffer from temporary or apparent inexactitude, and metaphor helps, (perhaps temporarily) configure understanding through a link of new and unnamed with something known that apparently has (perhaps only superficially) similar features or structures or behaviors until such time as more is known about a discovery to render metaphor unnecessary except for aesthetic purposes that help transform science itself into its visual aesthetic potential or its sonic aesthetic potential or its tactile aesthetic potential without additional drawing or painting or rhyming or dancing: science itself may have aesthetic potential and value of its own.
Senses of anyone (scientists and strippers, for instance, or scientists who are strippers) can lead to pleasure and disgust, and encourage a seeking of what provides pleasure. Science is not exempt from pleasure-seeking. Entire industries depend on a love of pleasure-seeking and temporary pleasure-finding, that like hunger and satiation, tends to be cyclic, recurring, necessary for some success of capitalism. An initial look at what SEM imagery reveals invites visual associations, connections with what is already in a seer’s visual memory bank (I am presuming visual ability and visual success; I am not addressing tactile modalities of engagement —please pardon the negligence— but in tactile engagement of images, there are still possibilities of identifying familiarity of structural interface with fingertips; I think of Touch the Universe, for instance, a book that makes meaningful cosmic structures through tactile engagement for the visually impaired) —something familiar might be recognized, perhaps erroneously in a first encounter in which excitement’s role might not be well controlled, enabling cross-scale connections, maybe even identification of a structural icon that seems to repeat throughout existence on multiple scales —a basic unit of structure, a basic unit of structure available to host configurable meanings, an ability that is essentially collaborative. Of course I have assumptions of my own. I'm offering alternative assessment to that role and to that service than what was so narrowly presented and, accordingly, likely also narrowly considered.
Like many there, I too have interest in collaboration and attempt to make collaborative ventures a routine part of my practice (indeed; I believe that making collaborative ventures a routine part of practice is inevitable, inescapable, a default mode of existing as long as that existence and its components have contact with anything). Most speakers acknowledged interdisciplinarity, were champions of it, supporters of a predictable range of intellectual and aesthetic cross-pollination, that is to say, expected mergers, infusing science and engineering with various modalities of creative process: visual, sonic, tactile, moving, implying that: All will explore art-making and the arts, but without a corresponding demand for art-makers to infuse their practice with more intellectual accountability and protocols of good experimentation (which would include good documentation), some of which might parallel protocols of scientific experimentation or even extend and/or reconfigure what good experimentation can be as it too evolves. There also happens to be some polysyllabic tastiness in the word interdisciplinary; I delight in saying it, and perhaps others do too, after a while becoming enticed by some deliciousness of what happens to tongue, twice kissing backs of upper teeth to say it, a puff of air escaping as mouth purses around ter, and tongue hits a hi-hat palate —some pleasure can be mined there. And that can be enough: mouth and lip service, oral fixation of saying the interdisciplinary-it word daily, proudly, without any unexpected interdisciplinary action following. I say this because of a tendency to mine for rather predictable products; sciences elevating art-making through pairings of artists with scientists and engineers, those who can supply technical interfaces of discovery and breakthrough offering what is more likely to elude someone whose training has been limited to creative rigor rather than quantitative rigor, competing, some thing, systems of logic and insight.
Speaking the interdisciplinary system activated by speaking fork (a video illustrating an essay on Limited Fork Theory: and its offering of multiple ways of studying interacting systems):
Though perhaps unintentional, it did seem that a consensus among speakers (there was one notable exception) was that research components of the university were more likely to elevate and extend expectations of art-making and the arts, through finding ways of integrating (appreciation of) art-making and the arts (as conventionally defined) into research practices, art-making and the arts benefiting from this association, as if without this association, art-making and the arts might not take on a certain kind of heft, certain kind of consequence, certain kind of intellectual respect. Some art-makers do of course maintain infusions of intellectual accountability in their practice, but the role of art-making and the arts in the research university is not to be configured as a broadening of such infusions or an exploring of intellectual rigor of art-making, encouraging emergence of theories of both personal and general art-making based on, for instance, rigorous study of decisions made, outcomes of attempts, reconfigurations and revisions of questions being asked as emerging answers are evaluated, or as alternatives to having to have answers are both imagined and constructed, art-making process documented carefully and analyzed, perhaps exposing rules at work in process, and offering opportunities to vary those rules, to explore making according to variable rules of experiments in making —this to address accountability of any maker, and to help any maker develop a vocabulary for each instance of making practice. Reversal of flexibility given to science and engineering to find value in art-making and the arts was not given to art-making and the arts to find value in science and engineering as host of connection. It became clear just what was being designated savior (of art -making and the arts) and what was being designated (in need of being) saved. Science and engineering host, invite art-making and the arts to bring creative process into disciplines of science and engineering but art-making and the arts are not viewed as hosts of science and engineering, as providers of viable sources for, for example, conventional NSF fundable and career-making experiment configuration.
What is considered Creative Practice does not (have to [when/if it does]) depend on arbitrary gestures.
Art-making and the arts were too defined by most of the speakers for any other possibilities to emerge. Paths offered are well-established. Significant and historic trailblazers and their loyal scholar-followers have kept these paths paved and determined, sometimes to a point of rut-formation, a sentiment advanced by one of seven speakers who warned against excessive bowing to what has been canonized, and against fortresses of disciplinary silos (forms of Big Bad Wolves) that grow naturally out of internal organizational structures whose roots are dense. More fire from blazing new trails might burn away some of that density, however. In some of these silos, opportunities emerge that are labelled opportunities, such as interdisciplinary opportunities that, unfortunately depend on having divisions that a doctrine of silos creates and maintains. What would/could interdisciplinary studies try to merge if there no clear-cut separate disciplinary silos? These divisions are products of fantasies of silos. Remove fantasy barriers, and connections already present might have opportunity to emerge (become visible to those unable ti see them). Disciplinary silos and their resulting assumptions offer but one system of organization of information, but not a system of information organization that information being organized requires. There are other systems. This current approach to interdisciplinarity betrays itself by seeking to join the disciplines, by accepting the appropriateness of these divisions; interdisciplinarity seems to maintain a loyalty to those disciplines, so will form a seam where these junctures occur, a fault line where these interdisciplinary junctures are vulnerable and susceptible to rupture. Rather easy to rip apart or ignore by moving closer to the interior of a discipline rather than remaining on the boundaries where interaction is less easily avoided. Only those hired or assigned to boundary or fringe positions will commit to an interdisciplinary ideology that occupies boundaries and fringes with them. This is not an integrative approach that assumes information is already connected, and that encourages configurations and reconfigurations of these connections. It is not necessary to build an interdisciplinary bridge to link that which is already linked —throughout, not just on the fringes. Such bridges become necessary when disciplinary silos (and factories of disciplinary silos) have been built, and travel from one silo to another is impeded and perhaps even discouraged by the silos themselves and by associated perceived differences that feed a logic of division and separation. Perhaps a role of art-making and the arts can be some dismantling of silos. Perhaps some of a university’s service to imagination can be imagining a university without enforcement of those silos even though Rita Dove in her text poem comments on how erection of (disciplinary) silos does not protect those silos from metaphor, from art-making about the silos themselves; indeed, protection from metaphor fails in the first word, an uncertainty of like, an admitting of doubt, texture of possibility, encouragement of continuing a system of questioning, like what else? and what else? —not in a search for the definitive, but a search for likeness, a study of likeness, a study of an apparent inevitability of likeness should it turn out that there is a like equivalence for anything, for everything, etc.:
Silos
Like martial swans in spring paraded against the city sky’s
shabby blue, they were always too white and
suddenly there.
They were never fingers, never xylophones, although once
a stranger said they put him in mind of Pan’s pipes
and all the lost songs of Greece. But to the townspeople
they were like cigarettes, the smell chewy and bitter
like a field shorn of milkweed, or beer brewing, or
a fingernail scorched over a flame.
No, no, exclaimed the children. They’re a fresh packet of chalk,
dreading math work.
They were masculine toys. They were tall wishes. They
were the ribs of the modern world.
____________________________________________________________
Of course, there’s more art-making work that can be done upon investigating particular silos, particular circumstances of geography, climate, economy, etc. From what distance does this consideration of silos occur? As that distance changes, as various climates fluctuate, what can be said about particular silos that accounts for some implications of emerging configurable information? From which angles of consideration, etc. Silo uniformity or something else? Which town? Do sociological implications of silos vary from town to town? Small owner silos versus corporate silos? What of silo shadows? Light-interface silo shadows and economic-interface silo shadows, for instance? What happens to abandoned silos? What are circumstances of abandonment? Etc. Do these tall structures of certain towns scrape the sky well? What about other configurations of scraping sky, urban development, satellites, ozone layer, etc.
The role of art-making and the arts wasn’t configurable in silos of the speakers’ imagination. In those silos that were better entered with compression, not expansion of the mind, in their ability to implement rules of inclusion and exclusion without having to state the rules, I learned that every undergraduate has an opportunity for a meaningful encounter with art at Princeton, the nature of which was not defined, but as it is a meaningful encounter, it could be a singular event
(as opposed to a seeking of a way to integrate that heightened level of perception throughout a life, a student as an integrated person in whom information should mingle anyway, what is encountered across the disciplines converging in a single person, a single life, not a person with silos in the mind to prevent mingling of information from all sources);
a singular event that according to the speaker, exposes non-artist students to that heightened perception artists are known for
—heightened perception that non-artist students evidently wouldn't encounter in pursuit of their more practical majors and careers —heightened perception that a meteorologist wouldn’t need, that an archeologist would need, that a scientist (paleontologist/molecular biologist, etc.) studying genetic or evolutionary memory wouldn’t need in turning back on, genes that have gone dormant in an evolutionary journey from dinosaur to chicken, resulting in these rather imaginative living embryonic sculptures of Gallus gallus domesticus with elongated dinosaurian tails, beaks of jurassic-appropriate teeth, and every reason, from a current status of fossil evidence, to keep their feathers.How much better this work will become once those researchers acquire that heightened perception all undergraduate students will encounter meaningfully at least once: a meaningful encounter. Certainly, nothing in the keynote address precluded undergraduate opportunities for multiple encounters, but heightened perception and heightened sensitivity to how words are used when applied outside of the speaker’s customary academic silo —pictures painted with words, sounds words make in translations from transmission to reception, some of it discordant to some ears, and textures of those translations, for instance— might help the speakers at the event better understand (or be able to notice them at all) rules at work in their configurations of research, art-making, and the arts, configurations they in all likelihood inherited, acquired, learned in institutions similar to the research institutions they now lead; configurations that neither research nor imagination helped them reconfigure into discoveries that are less likely, not impossible, but less likely to occur when art-making and the arts are perceived as that which (only) enriches society while scientific research performs, it is implied, some other role in society, something evidently more quantitatively significant because the research university can extend life-support (implying a need for such support to stave off certain kinds of death of art-making and the arts, or to resuscitate when death is either in progress or has just occurred, research, it is implied, being healthier and in a better position to save; indeed a [presumed superior] intellectual rigor of [scientific] research suggests and supports competency of the research university to save art-making and the arts, something policy-reconfigurations could render moot [rhymes with research loot]).
What was stated was open to these interpretations; configurations of the speakers’ words and ideas did not include limiting factors that could reduce emergence of interpretations such as what this response offers —variables that this response delivers could have been reduced though a revision of phrasing and a revision of thinking that is a parent of that phrasing, thinking also a parent of policy; a failure to anticipate such variables when preparing speeches and the keynote address was just not good science, a form of science, but not a good form —unacceptable is a lack of awareness of where those ideas and configuration of them into utterance was weak, allowing some sentiments expressed to be historical, obsolete or even, worse, irrelevant as they applied to forms of art-making and the arts that are not the exclusive forms practiced —just how much research of art-making and the arts was done by those speaking, those forming the policy behind the role of art-making and the arts in the research university that is in service to the imagination? Why so little imagination in how art-making and the arts and their role was configured? Silo syndrome.
So much stored grain to sustain existing diets with palatable comfort food.
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Image sources:
Dinosaur-Chicken evolution
Gratitude Steel band
SEM of AIDS virus
Touch the Universe
Tree of Life
X-RAY of women's feet
Audio source:
Keep Hope Alive
Video clip source:
Discovery Channel
Nikon Small World Photomicrography
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