hunting text

Current research on schools of poetry, tracing back technique and themes through all outsider literature, from the beats back to the surrealists, the modernists, etc etc... curious to find the strain of occult/ spiritual practices that underlies most of these groups. was blown away reading a biographical sketch on Yeats, too many parallels to my basic belief systems, he even created a whole system of personality types based off the phases of the moon, and recorded in his poetry.

also this, from Jean Baudrillard's "Simulations" (semiotext(e) publications):

"This would be the successive phases of the image:
-it is the reflection of a basic reality
-it masks and perverts a basic reality
-it masks the absence of a basic reality
-it bears no relation to any reality
whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum. in the first case, the image is a good appearance- the representation is of the order of sacrament. in the second, it is an evil appearance- of the order of malefice. in the third, it plays at being an appearance- it is of the order of sorcery. in the fourth, it is no longer in the order of appearance at all, but of simulation."

this last being about where our culture is right now. the question being how to take it to the next step, to reclaim the image by positing there is no difference between the image and reality (at least as far as we are able to percieve it), in that to say there is a difference between images and reality creates a false dichotomy. everything is real, even those things resigned only to the imagination. to give something a name, a function, a relation to other things, is to give it life. this applies equally to poetry/ art as it does to sensory perception. for example, when i write moon, beggar, glass of water, i am talking about these things (even if they are not specific moons, beggars, or glasses of water in front of me). when i see these things i am seeing a moon, a beggar, a glass of water (even if it could be argued i am perceiving merely lightwaves and assigned mental labels and not objects at all). the image of something is what it is. what it means however, is a whole other issue, and dependent on both cultural and subjective reference to these things. when i say or see "moon" it brings up a host of connotations and allusions from anything as ancient greek mythology to my own life, etc... which i imply in my use of the image, but are not extant in the image itself, and this is the key point, if someone else reads my word moon or is pointed out the moon in the sky, their interpretation of moon may be vastly different from their own experiences of moon (unless of course i give proper context for my own interpretation). but this does not change the fact that the moon is still the moon. even to create an artificial moon (orbiting an artificial planet in an artificial galaxy) is dependent on that it is still a moon.

Yeats rued the fact that most poets of his time (and this has only gotten worse) did not draw their images (and meanings) from systems of correspondence, large cultural drifts of symbol/ interpretation bordering on the archetypal, whereby the poet showing a particular image is sure to be understood. nowadays the trend is towards reiterating portions of their life without any regard to symbolism at all, turning poetry into a journalistic or biographical medium that when read the audience has very little subconscious imagery to connect to, unless they have had a similar experience in their own life. and even then, how poetic is it, in relation to the epic imagistic poems that have withstood the axe of time? Granted, all one can draw on is their own experiences, otherwise the words do not ring true, but to draw these disparate events into the vast host of cultural, and human, meaning... to say "i saw the moon" and have that imply not only this occurrence of the moon but centuries worth of moons. imagine the force then behind that word, that could send shivers down your spine and impart the physical affect of the moon's gravity on the blood, a language of reckoning where saying "moon" creates Moon. the image not just as reality, but containing the full reality of that image.