what is evil?

Evil is a word. If we could grasp that then we would lnow enough to say, "Evil is an attempt at meaning. It is an action or sequemce or dynamic that HOPES to make sense, DESPITE its great impact and importance." Since i spired love ALWAYS allows for its own unimportance and further, for its importance to mature into fruition like a seed. The lover says, I hope you remember to AVAIL (allow yourself to have and use) my stremgth and support, should you need or decide. The evil-doer simply says, "Consider this..." and then shares potentially harmful influence.  Before competitive status, doctors attracted the sick.  After society reinforced more rigid divisions, helpful do-gooders found themselves leaving SIGNS pointing to their AVAILABLE PRESENCE.  Similar to the difference between speaking and writing: one is a living architecture where you may house your self for sanctuary (fortified safety) .... the other is a hollow chance pre-scription that hopes to be followed correctly.  Writing proved more valuable, however, as techniques became too complex to memorize.

Evil sought to replace the good intentions with rotten beams. The home of life faced professional liars. "Consider this..." slowly became, "And now, suddenly, the new Truth is..." wait for it, right? Advertising depended upon the time it took for people to need vwrsus the time they enjoyed freedom from the very same need.  Chasing the in-between space of knowledge, evil became fundamentally anonymous and thrown.  Now we are able to combine both evolutionary paths into a whole, organic and complete virtue.  Do gooders have found the strength to help anonymously, and evil more often feels compelled to expise and confess its deficiencies.

DICKINSON'S DIFFERENTIAL

DICKINSON'S NEW WORLD DIFFERENTIAL



According to the article by Marjorie Perloff "Emily Dickinson and the Theory Canon" - located at Buffalo University's Electronic Poetry Center and available at [ http://epc.buffalo.edu/<wbr />authors/perloff/articles/<wbr />dickinson.html ] - Emily Dickinson remains problematic to contemporary post-structuralist and Derridean Deconstruction theorists.

 

The EPC was founed in 1995 and serves as a central gateway to resources in electronic poetry and poetics at the University at Buffalo, the University of Pennsylvania's PennSound PennSound, UBU web, and on the Web at large. Their aim is simple: to make available a wide range of resources centered on digital and contemporary formally innovative poetries, new media writing, and literary programming.  It is a fantastic resource for students and poetry lovers!

 

In the article Marjorie states: "you will not find Dickinson’s name anywhere in the studies of Paul de Man or Jacques Derrida, in Julia Kristeva or Luce Iragaray, in Roland Barthes or Gilles Deleuze, in Michel Serres or Slavoj Zizek. Helène Cixous, whose strong feminist / deconstructionist writings have addressed highly diverse writers–Clarice Lispector as well as Joyce, Lewis Carroll and Iris Murdoch as well as Kafka and Beckett–has had nothing whatever to say about Dickinson. Again, I have found no references to Dickinson in the writings of the Frankfurt School, or, more surprisingly, since these are Anglophone theorists, in the work of Raymond Williams or Terry Eagleton, Frank Kermode or Fredric Jameson."

 

And further, that, "...to explain the neglect of Dickinson on the part of post-structuralist theory... My own hunch is that it has to do with certain assumptions about poetic language and poetic process–assumptions that differentiate Dickinson from the Modernists and their Romantic precursors whose work remains exemplary for theorists from Adorno and Jameson to Cixous and Kristeva."

 

As Perloff compares Emily to the Romantic poet Wordsworth in her essay, so too may Dickinson's prosody, syntax and reference-obscurity be compared to the poet Paul Celan's, whose work is cited so frequently by the Post-structuralists as to render him and his writing an admirable and precise foil to compare to Dickinson's.  I would like to situate Emily Dickinson, her life and her work briefly in relation to Paul Celan, but also in context and rapport to antiquity's great, female poet, Sappho of Lesbos.  I wish to demonstrate that it is a uniquely American sensibility in her life and writing's inflection, intention and rendering which make it more challenging for post structuralists such as Roland Barthes or Derridean Deconstructionists such as Helene Cixous to treat upon her ouvre.  The contemporary, French postmodern philosopher and critic Jean Baudrillard, author of the prescient and analytical, celebratory tome, "America" will be a go-to touchstone.  I will also gloss possible reasons why the USA based, Austrian born critic Perloff may find Dickinson's work more accessible, than the post-structuralists she mentioned.  American poet and critic Adrienne Rich may, too.  What does this point to for the future of Emily Dickinson studies in the context of a Post-Derrida critical and philosophical environment?  His ideas are currently exploding into areas of thought, analysis, protocol and policy which may have been unthought of a few decades ago: areas such as Law Studies & Criminology, Medicine and Bio-Ethics, Futurism and Computer Studies are turning to his massive body of work with greater frequency as Deconstruction's near liquid adaptibility of technique and freedom of form as a vehicle for thought undo its previous bad reputation for obscurantism and near-absurdity.

 

In the article, Perloff contends that The New Critics, who generated much Emily Dickinson literary criticism and were chronologically holding sway in the 1950's (just before Deconstruction's thought-upheaval of the late 60's), "were less committed to Romanticism than to Renaissance poetry, especially the Metaphysicals, and to such Victorians as Browning, Arnold, and Hopkins (with whom Dickinson has some real affinities). But for post-structuralist theory, the Romantic tradition is the central one." (Perloff, "Emily Dickinson and the Theory Canon" -henceforth abbreviated: Perloff, "EDTC")  The romantic tradition is crystallized in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, but Celan's Eurocentrism and cultural / textual innovation provides a corollary.

 

Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.com) provides a concise, working definition for New Criticism:  "New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. The movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism. The work of English scholar I. A. Richards, especially his Practical Criticism and The Meaning of Meaning, which offered what was claimed to be an empirical scientific approach, were important to the development of New Critical methodology."

 

Some immediate and powerful contrasts between the basic working assumptions of the New Critical School and the post-structuralists include formalism, itself.  While Roland Barthes, for example, in his "semiological" book length study of Balzac's novel "Sarrasine", which is entitled "S/Z", made use of rigor and discipline in his methodical approach to explain Balzac's book word by word, sentence by sentence... a methodology as a whole was conspicuously absent.  Empiricism (the notion that knowledge comes from sense-forms and is therefor both qualifiable and quantifiable) is used as a provisional method by Barthes only in order to put its absolute veracity into question.  Logic and the traditional structures of Western culture, what may be dubbed "Phallogocentrism" (or the idea that the phallus: male, transcendental signifier standing for power; and 'logos': [Greek word for 'ground', or, 'reason'] made to stand for the West's reliance upon Logic), are put into question in post-structuralist texts.  Every theorist mentioned in Perloff's above quoted catalog, and related thinkers such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Avital Ronell, proceeds from a hard won critical, philosophical and literary theoretic freedom.  This freedom in thinking insists that while, yes, the formalist assumptions which sponsor Twentieth Century's sweeping advances in technology and philosophy are important (that is, the notions of male centered power and logic-based reasoning, which is our cultural inheritance and which were fully operable in Emly Dickinson's milieu are important)... what is more important is our ability to question and radically transcend or even transgress upon those very same assumptions.

 

An example of this could consist in Barthe's study "S/Z"'s being shaped as a music score, a great example of Western Formalist rigor and tradition, yet it being used to propagate post-Freudian literary analysis (among other things) which closely examined the erotic structures of man to man interaction in light of possible Father-Issues.  We have here a situation in which the best of the toolkit bequeathed to us by our global history's European domination is not divorced from our freedom to build upon, adapt from, appropriate or disinherit important aspects of it.  Cixous' 60's famous feminist essay, "The Laugh of the Medusa" calls this 'bricolage' (French for 'Do-It-Yourself') and insists that this is the only way to survive the 20th Century's trauma while still being able to thrive in using its tainted tools.  Tainted because the century began with the oppression of women and ethnic minorities on a global scale, yet ended with liberatory and all-encompassing trends toward further freedom.  Not merely political freedom, but also freedom of conscience, as post-structuralism's influence is felt even in Catholic Studies (for example, John Millbank's appropriation of Jacques Derrida's thought in his New Orthodoxy - theosophical / theological work).  If the New Critics relied upon tradition and the idea of one to one correspondence between word and meaning, their neat view of signification would see Dickinson as a riddle to solve.  Perhaps an intentional riddle put forth by the author, who 'encoded' her works with a successful 'solution' in mind.  This would create a reliance upon Authorial Intent, another cherished tradition that the Deconstructionists challenged.  In their view, what the author intended might very well be important, but only provisionally so, as what meaning any reader found to be available in the text was of potentially equal or greater value (than what the author might have wanted), at any and all times.

 

This shift in theory and thought from New Criticism to post-structuralism put Emily Dickinson's canonical importance into jeopardy.  Her work had already been heavily appropriated by a school of thinking which purported to speak for American "sense and sensibility", while never having its underbelly shadow-side explored.  For while Dickinson spoke the same language as the Romantics (incorporating ideas of romance, sentiment, tradition and propriety into her letters and poems) she frequently challenged and problematized them.  A great example of this is:

 

(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Ed. Johnson: #1694, stanza one)

 

Speech is one symptom of affection

And Silence one -

The perfectest communication

Is heard of none

 

This is a clear statement by the poet and correspondent Emily Dickinson that both speech and silence remain problematic.  That there is room enough for further thought in seemingly simple expression(s).  Her writing is considered 'gnomic' which means that it contains, or may contain, hidden or not very apparent messages and unexpected available meanings.  The one thing most can agree upon regarding her work is its near inexhaustibility of relevance in areas as diverse as esthetics, politics, equality, philosophy of ethics and ideas of spirituality and religion.  Her words are never limited to what understandeing you may gain from them, they always reward further inquiry.  While the New Critics may have canonized her for her gorgeous renditions of stirring wit and illumination, Perloff and others wonder why the post structuralists did not canonize her for her depth and wide language-reference base.  Deconstructionists can find infinite connections between ideas in her elegant associative links, whose sparing use of narrow-definition allows for great free play in understanding for individual readers.

 

A major point of distinction between New Critics and post-structuralists and postmoderns is the shift in thinking from seeing a literary work as a "self contained, self-referential aesthetic object" (Wikipedia).  Deconstructionists and their kind made heavy use of "infinite semiosis" the idea introduced by the American Charles Sanders Peirce in the late 1800's and very early 1900's which states that meaning consists of endless further reference and which was appropriated by Derrida, forming a cornerstone of Deconstructionist thought.  New Critics saw a poem, for example, as a self sustaining thing, while post-structuralists viewed it as an opening onto further connections and meanings.  This is a salient difference which organizes much more than technical approach, it is a shift in spirit; postmodernism could never have evolved without the ability to make seemingly out-of-the-blue connections between seemingly very disparate things.

 

In "Letters of Emily Dickinson" edited by Mabel Loomis Todd, Dover Publications 2003 (first published in 1894 by Roberts Brothers, Boston), page 133:

 

Late Autumn, 1853

Sabbath Afternoon

     DEAR FRIENDS, -- I thought I would write again.  I write you many letters with pens which are not seen.  Do you receive them?

       I think of you all to-day, and dreamed of you last night.

     When father rapped on my door to wake me this morning, I was walking with you in the most wonderful garden, and helping you pick--roses, and though we gathered with all our might, the basket was never full.

 

Again, in Emily Dickinson's letters we find an allegory of plentiude and generosity in service of friendship which suggests that her intellectual sensibility was one of search and reward, without scarcity.  I believe this passage points to a mentality which announces further opportunity in meaning for every successful meaning achieved.  Signification can be seen as the "roses" gathered and the framework for their use, the mind, as the "basket" which is never (over) filled.

 

While poet Paul Celan's agony was easily understood and identifiable with by post WW2 Europe: his family was murdered by Nazis, he inherited his oppressor's language, his creative dignity was attacked later in France by the accusation of Plagiarism (which led to his suicide by drowning in the river Seine), Emily Dickinson's agony was less easily understood or appropriable.  How could she claim to suffer the ravages of war (in her case the American Civil War) while leading a posh, aristocratic, upper class existence esconced in her family's well-to-do Amherst stronghold?  How could she know the interior terror of language appropriation available to Holocaust survivors working in German when she spoke English, whose cultural markers and differentiations between Britain and America were not so clearly problematic as that of Nazi Death-Camp survivors?  And how could one compare suicide (Celan's) to disappointment (Dickinson's) following so-called artistic failure?

 

My contention is that Dickinson's great sensitivity allows for a contemporary and empathic understanding of the possible depths of her suffering.  Many psychologists have argued upon the ravages of Survival.  Perhaps her hurt was all the more for being the witness to the disenfranchisement, dehumanization and cultural and physical decimation of women and blacks in her society, and not being able to directly change the situation outside of writings which would wait generations to see the light of day and whose importance was not at all perceived at the time of their composition.  Celan's suffering was direct and obvious as was the trauma any mimetic presentations or understandings of it, possibly, as well.  The dissociative pain of the holocaust survivor entailed the loss of subjectivity and identity, the victims no longer remained themselves.  But what of those who hurt but did not have sufficient recourse to lose themselves?  Dickinson's pain renewed itself, daily, and found no end in an early, self inflicted death.  I do not by any means wish to compare these different life stories in terms of value, however that is what some may think the Deconstructionists may be doing.  The idea that Celan's suffering was more authentic or powerful than Dickinson's must be challenged, since both authors' suffering inflected the beauty of their work, profoundly; and both authors affected posterity in inspiring greater thought and care regarding fundamental, human issues.  Instead, I believe that Dickinson presented a challenging ouvre for post-structuralists due to her American Sensibility, and not because she was seen to be of little consequence.

 

In "America", published in 1986, French postmodern thinker Jean Baudrillard states, “Snapshots aren’t enough.  We’d need the whole film of the trip in real-time…”  The implication being that to understand America one must first understand scale.  The book is peppered with fecund references to American Largesse, from big skies, to endless interstate highways, to cultural sensibilities appropriated by minorities from their historical masters and subverted and made to stand upon their ends, to conceptualization of the famous state-of-the-art.  If America represents the state-of-the-art for Globalisation, Americans resist the very globalisation they enact and are forced to embody, clinging to the peculiarities and colloquialisms that Dickinson herself is still famous for.  This is a feature of difference between hers and Celan's corpus.  Celan introduces a terrifying and blank genericism which reminds the world that modern atrocities are things capable of replication, while Dickinson's approach to the unthinkable, while still abstract and universal, makes use of specificity amidst the generalities.

 

Dickinson writes:

 

I am alive - because

I do not own a House -

 

(Dickinson Poems, Johnson, #605)

 

making use of very universal language and conceptuality in service of a particularization and specificity.  It is only she who is alive, the reason being her ownership of a house.

 

Celan by contrast:

 

Fugue of Death

Paul Celan, 1930 - 1970

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at nightfall
we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night
we drink it and drink it
we are digging a grave in the sky it is ample to lie there
A man in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when the night falls to Germany your golden
 hair Margarete
he writes it and walks from the house the stars glitter he 
 whistles his dogs up
he whistles his Jews out and orders a grave to be dug in
 the earth
he commands us strike up for the dance

...

making use of very specific circumstance and detail in order to offer up a poignant vision of destruction caused via nihilism.  Men, dogs, dance and stars are all helpless to conjure the particularity of presence Dickinson evokes, despite his uniqueness of reference and its precision.  Dickinson seems to say, no matter what anyone does, it is written in the record of life, Celan seems to say no matter what is written in the record of life, it could be anyone who has written it.  They are both much needed perspectives, but perhaps, since the project of post-structuralism was to loosen the world's overt-tight reins upon meaning, it is understandably easier for them to adopt directness of approach upon Celan's existential statement, while their very silence regarding Dickinson's bouyant optimism amounts to a great show of respect.  Deconstruction theory came specifically of age during great social upheaval in the 1960's and it has never been very divorced from its revolutionary sensibility.  Poets of overt resistance seem to suit its needs best (such as Coleridge).  However Dickinson's coy, contradictory and often playful approach, while embodying post-structuralist style and technique, are not as easily appropriable to its specific end or project, perhaps, currently and regarding the very recent past.

Adrienne Rich in "Vesuvius At Home" (Adrienne Rich's Poetry And Prose, Norton, 1975) page 191 states of Dickinson, "[t]he poet experiences herself as loaded gun, imperious energy", perhaps meaning that Emily's dynamism is the new Empire of The Good ready to challenge the Evil Empire.  Indeed, Emily's reclusiveness was a smoke-screen, she was one of the friendliest and most polite souls, generating an amazing corpus of letters which amply demonstrate intense goodwill fostering connection and evolution in an intensely changing and growing socius.  Celan only knew the Evil Empire, and European sensibility was years away from the current political formation of The European Union which expressly stands against the possibility of a Western (and Eastern) Europe united in the hatred of the Axis, World War II powers.  This Empire of The Good is armed, however, and ready to use force against villainy, and a sense of chivalry, and a cooperative nature infuse the writings of Emily Dickinson.  Even at her most brutal and problematic,

(Dickinson Poems, Johnson #905) 

Split the Lark - and you'll find the Music -

[...]

 

Loose the Flood - you shall find it patent -

Gush after Gush, reserved for you -

 

 

...points to a framework of hospitality behind such seemingly cruel references as dissection or vivisection.  A twisted silver lining upon a grey cloud.  This is reminiscent of a central thesis found in Jacques Derrida's work, "The Politics of Friendship" where he elucidates the idea that even the insult, designed specifically to be hurtful, incorporates the foundations for hospitality because it exists only by way of commonality of language.  It is Dickinsonian largesse which may refute her "Elitism" as it seems she provides an aristocratic sensibility only in order to share and confer it, instead of hoarding.

 

 

Translator and scholar Willis Barnstone, in "Sappho and the Greek Lyric Poets", Schocken Books, New York, 1988, states, "In Sappho we hear for the first time in the Western world the direct words of an individual woman.  While Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg in "The Book of J" posit that the core text of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, were written by a female of the Semitic Aristocracy, this cannot be proven.  Sappho stands as the first, feminine voice.  Psappho, as she referred to herself in her native Aiolic Greek dialect, was a famous woman who taught poetry and performed to great acclaim.  However, she was demonized by society and the early Christian church, who found her sensual words and life story offensive.  Like Emily Dickinson Sappho relied upon short, enigmatic poems, whose lyricism was infused with expert prosody and whose meanings challenged assumptions too-easily held regarding gender roles.  Her contemporary, male poet, Pindar, whose fame matched hers in life, is not nearly as much of a household name as hers.  In fact, we derive the word "lesbian" from her girls' school located on her beautiful, native island of Lesbos, and the term sapphic means woman to woman erotic activity.  Like Dickinson, Sappho's life intrigued male, hegemonic, phallogocentric interest, and like Dickinson, the readership at large always wondered about her mysterious love life.  Like Dickinson, Sappho created poetic utterance rife with sensuous imagery and romantic ideals.  Sappho has a rhyme scheme named after her, the Sapphic Stanza and her name has come to dominate our understanding of ancient Greek lyricism.

 

In close reading both poets one may find deep yearning and an uncharacteristic mixture of strength and vulnerability.  What separated these two women from other writers was the fact that they could psychologically denude themselves, and yet carry on in the face of their own fragile humanity.

 

Sappho writes:

 

I barely heard you,

my darling;

 

You came in your

trim garments,

 

and suddenly: beauty

of your garments.

 

(Sappho #238, Barnstone)

 

Such subtle evocation of the terrible majesty of love, this lyric makes use of a shift in shades of meaning, "your trim garments" becomes "beauty / of your garments".  By forcing the reader into a more conscious awareness of the image for the clothing, the poet reinforces the beauty of the woman the clothing adorns.  Sappho's economic and powerful lyrics rivalled ancient Chinese poems in their concision and yet she remained the free Greek woman capable of terrifying the Church into book banning and poem destroying policy.

 

Dickinson writes:

 

Love's stricken "why"

Is all that love can speak -

Built of but just a syllable,

The hugest hearts that break.

 

Forcing language itself to embody the reality of love, the reader's consciousness experiences the epiphanic truth that Dickinson's love is manifested in the poem itself directly.  That instead of the writing signifying love, the portentious syllable which makes up that word functions as the performance of its action.

 

Both women use the beauty of language to compell their readership into a finer understanding of the subtle mechanics which underlie human emotion and reason.  Both women generously offer of their own hard-won wisdom to any audience willing to struggle with the finery of their conceptual mechanics.  Both women created poems-as-technology which propelled consciousness past its status quo.

 

Marjorie Perloff writes of a careful audienceship being able to read Dickinson's work from fascicle to fascicle.  Meaning that since Emily Dickinson bundled her poems into individual, hand sewn books (or fascicles) one could compartmentalize the works contained into various textual fields (Perloff, EDTC).  This is an astute understanding of Dickinson's subtle process.  Emily makes textual fields available beyond the scope of a given poem's words.  Dickinson poems echo across each other with the same consonance as many of the words that they contain.  Emily's work creates internal resonances amongst her various creations.  In fact, Perloff aludes to this effect being very much available in Dickinson's letters, as well.  Additionally, Perloff states,

 

if Dickinson is not a Modernist, she is, ironically, very much a precursor of what we might call the "differential" poetics of our own time–"differential" in that there is not one "correct" or even preferred text–but a variorum set that allows the reader to consider alternatives. As such, Dickinson’s is a poetics of process that allows for much more reader involvement than does the Modernist aesthetic of the mot juste. 

 

(Perloff, EDTC)

 

The issue raised is why the post-structuralists would not champion such an open ended and generous poetics as Emily's.  For she has granted the readership authority in interpretation at a time when authorial intent was still considered sacred to many.  After Roland Barthe's seminal essay, "The Death of the Author", however, Deconstruction theorists and others rightly understood the textual space as a hotly contested zone where power should not be centered merely upon the writer.  Indeed, the format for power operative in a postmodern understanding of any given text was decentralized in the extreme.  Infinite semiosis and cultural polyvalence, alone, ensured that unfair hegemonies would not co-opt any given text's vitally important ability to inspire positive ideas outside of what the writer or creator of those texts may or may not have intended.  Yet, Perloff claims that:

 

When Bakhtin, Adorno, the French post-structuralist theorists, and even most Marxist and feminist theorists have talked about lyric, their point de repère has essentially been the Modernist lyric-- the autonomous, semantically dense, and indeterminate lyric of a Mallarmé, a Rilke, or a Stevens. Not surprisingly, then, they have underrated Emily Dickinson even as they have underrated Gerard Manley Hopkins, or, for that matter, Emerson. True, with respect to meaning-making, Dickinson is very much of her time: despite her complex and difficult metaphysic, she believes that poetry can articulate truths, even if those truths are to be told "slant."

 

(Perloff, EDTC)

 

However, it is not in the interest of post-structuralists to "rate" literature or the importance of given poems or poets.  That, in fact, is an old stand-by of the now discarded tradition which holds authors as central and authors to be placed in a hierarchy of importance wherein their "rating" is derived from a combination of technical skill and critical merit.  Contrastingly, the postmoderns, Deconstructionists, and post-structuralists often view language itself as the "author" in the sense that any and all meanings available in a work are recognized to never have been fully appreciable by the creator of those works.  Yet, since Emily Dickinson wrote generations before the popularization of this notion, I contend that she was not only in full awareness of the equivocation between her power as a writer and its importance or merit (in other words that she knew that her writings were experimental), but that she was also painfully aware that most critics of her time, or even the near future would not accept this.  The fact that she chose to tell her truths "slant" tips the critic off to her awareness that meaning in poetry would soon undergo a critical revolution.  I believe that Perloff is entirely correct regarding Dickinson's "differential" poetics, but I think she is amiss in assuming that the post-structuralists failed to treat her due to a perceived "low-rating" they may have given her.  Instead, I believe it is an issue pertaining to the differences between Americana and European cultures.

 

The idea that there is an onus of Perfection in USA yields a problematic sensibility.  A quest for the absolute which is a hyper realization of European earnestness.

 

The New World has always been hyper attuned to the sameness and differences it may manifest in relation to the Old.  The American experiment was begun in direct reaction to the most perfect manifestation of Empire that Europe could then produce.  Instead of remaining in Europe's shadow, however, an important part of the American sensibility (amply demonstrated in its exploratory nature and pioneering spirit) remains its perceived challenge to improve upon anything and everything that Europe has done.  This yields a somewhat obsessive American temperament and vertiginous freedom which I think the post-structuralists found a bit over the top and intimidating.  It's not that they thought her work unworthy of critical response, but in fact, that the work was too dense and too rife with available plenitude of referential meaning and cultural possibility to choose to handle.  Not to mention, the Civil War and the intellectual politics of 1800's USA was not the most pressing concern for post-WW2 Europe.  These European philosophers simply took Dickinson's genius for granted as part of the cultural, global inheritance setting the stage for their efforts.  They saw in Emily's "differential" poetics a kindred spirit and someone they could analyze and celebrate in the near future, they put her on the back-burner precisely because they were so much in sympathy with her thought, sensibility and years-ahead-of-its-time poetics.

 

- Stanley Gemmell - POSTED 2/22/2015

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you sincerely for your time.

 

 

General Thoughts on Internet Pornography

The internet is so powerful, but very much so to those who use it.  Those who are preoccupied with net porn are at once feeding an industry which helps fuel tech, at least indirectly, but also are neurologically exposing themselves to powerful changes.

The idea of Utopia is at the heart of hedonism for the positive minded.  They see a limitless expanse of good feeling and compatibility and in some ways porn captures that idea.

But when the physical effects of such powerful interfacing cause the onset of lopsided views upon reality, the subject of this mutation must take stock of the change.

The problem is in the highly rigid codes society uses to function and which are totally subverted and skewed online.  In a major city on any day, one would never behold the sights one could easily conjure with technology behind closed doors.  If one values the private experience too much and never links it with the rest of life's responsibilities and cause and effects one ends up isolating into a realm of illusion.  When interested parties follow in order to rescue, the shame of one's preference causes panic and damage.

If society instead allows for the reality of fanatical fantasizing and educates and assists those who wish to put it into perspective, the problem is ammeliorated.

The other problem is children.  Child sex abuse and the access to pornography for children is an issue which those currently in authority never had to face.  The internet is new.  As such there are massive areas of ignorance and apathy regarding the facts, or there is over reaction and uncontrolled wrath.  Balance should be sought as changing norms continue to dictate our shared futures.

Kids are our greatest resource and responsibility.  Their education, happiness and strength produces powerful, compassionate people to help our species ever evolve.  Children must be protected but not merely by way of control.  Instead of just attempting to police people's minds, instead offer sober and healthy world views at every turn.  Inspire the masses to continue to seek the highest and best good for all.

PEACE and keep on improving!

Stanley Gemmell

Response to Bill Gates' Education 2.0

Response to:  http://www.thegatesnotes.com/Topics/Education/Education-2
GREAT ARTICLE, BILL GATES IS AWESOME
[I had to shorten the reply to 3000 characters at The Gates Notes, this is the original, full version.]

All this is very good.  However we must manage resources at the very top!  Thank God Bill Gates is a good man.  The use of technology freely given to the disenfranchised, the ease of use with which the machines are operated, such niceties are laudable.  But what happens if the power falls into the hands of evil?  That is the issue today in certain places which are using the internet to locate and oppress political enemies.  Online learning should take precedence because it is fast and good, because it is user enabled and impossible to cheat with if programmed correctly, but it should always be backed up with paper!  The most important elements having rightful places in culture even during blackouts!

Next issue... resistance to computing in classrooms can always stem from ad filtering.  The intimate relationship between advertisement and media consumption can wreak havok upon the education scene.  Learning and marketting HAVE to be kept as far away from each other as possible.  The simple reason being that PROPAGANDA is its illegitamate and evil progeny.  If you have kids who need a lunch room and then Walmart and Target rush to make the lunch room only on the condition that their logo be displayed, you have officially sold out your lunchroom to the highest, private bidder.  IF the logo display REMAINS optional and the kids receive an announcement explaining that yes private industry helped fund their public space, BUT that space REMAINS public and is not beholden to such corporate interests, ever, at all, THEN the learning remains unfettered and the young minds FEEL un-oppressed.  This is not a light issue, although it is under reported.  The psychological effects of legality and presence are huge, if not well understood in today's 2012.

The simple fact remains that, take marijuana for instance, it being so popular, and so illegal sets up a culture clash of great proportions yet which is swept under the rug and ignored.  Any activity which a citizen personally enjoys and truly regards as harmless yet which is made illegal and is used to defame LESSENS the impact of the TRUTH regarding TRULY heinous and illegal, hurtful activities.  As Flach put it in, "The Secret Strength of Depression", an early 80s popular self help book, we experience moral numbing because there are too many opportunities for guilt.  If we narrow in on what we want people to feel bad about, instead of spreading it so wide that folks have to decide what is right and wrong from the menu of their personal "recent-choices" we can better SPIRITUALLY ENFORCE our rules.  There were only TEN commandments while the rest of the rules were left off of the marquee.

As far as learning in the computing age goes, THE BIGGEST VICTORY is the equalization of geographical limits in our world.  The fact that an impoverished student with a brilliant idea in South Africa can make it to the world forum stage of Hollywood, for instance, is now commonplace and absolutely wonderful for the self esteem and practical plans and hopes of the avid student.

Learning is still taken for granted because it has not been singled out enough as one of the COMMANDMENTS of our modern world.  Advertisers are reaping the fruit of its importance by placing their signals in its midst, yet are not being explicit enough in making EDUCATION cool and sexy, because they don't want to be seen as nerdy.  Overly simplistic and reductionist aesthetics are using complex and detailed systems for the transmission of their (arguably non-)messages and it is time people woke up to the fact that unless we really really make a big deal out of grades, homework, degrees and just in general SMARTNESS, unless we pin point that specific IDEA as the biggest, best, coolest, most awesome thing... we stand in danger of undoing the progress that our cultural educative journey has gifted us with!!!  CHEERS AND KEEP UP THE AWESOMENESS - PUT SMARTS FIRST - INTELLIGENCE RULES, THE DOLLAR DROOLS!  :-)

TRIPLE SACRIFICE

THE THREE MODES OF APPROACHING GOD mentioned in Irwin Kula "You Shall Rejoice In Your Festival" downloadable here: http://www.bjpa.org/Publications/details.cfm?PublicationID=2540 are:

THANKSGIVING
NERVOUSNESS
GUILT

If one looks at Pharmakon as related by Jacques Derrida in "Dissemination" the drug may be seen as part poison, part cure, part magic charm.

Drug as poison is when it harms either intentionally or not.  Drug as cure is when it heals.  Drug as charm indicates an intensification both for good and/or ill.

The three modes of sacrifice indicate an approach to God based on self truth.  Thanks to God when all is well, a nervous approach when one needs help and an approach asking forgiveness when one knows one did wrong.

What if the Drug is a catalyst for these three approaches?  If when one ingests, one automatically reacts according to deep rooted logic of mystery necessary for elevating one's state?  When you take a psychedelic, depending on what kind of voyage you take, the result being a more integrated awareness and more fully developed skill set for action...

The only responsible, educated use of a psycho active substance is one which more securely enhances one's ability to think, know and act.  If drug users take more notes from long established traditions in the ever growing area of soul-mind-body inter-action, more life-improving experiences will be generated using psychoactives ofr vehicle!  CHEERS

Real Time Online

Time is precious, of course.  But our perception of it directly affects the quality of our use.  If we are rushed we do not engage fully in life, and if we are bored we do not value life enough to get really creative and fresh.  I am an artist and a lover, so, for me innovation is key.  In both life areas I want to present both what is pleasing, and what's never really been seen, just so.  Innovation clings to tradition until the moment it casts itself in flight toward the promise of glory.  Stagnation clings to habit fearfully, until the moment it is overpowered by the realization that something fresh and not one's own has replaced the central interest.  Time moves more quickly or slowly to one's mind depending on so many factors, yet, we all want time to slow when we are pleased and to rush when we are not.  How does the world wide web, which intensifies so many areas of our minds, while paralysing so many spheres of behavior, how does the world wide web become the most useful tool for all in terms of maximizing benefit while minimizing cost?  I speak of the benefit of the luxurious sensation of having all the time illy n the world, and the accompanying sense of primordial security, while I speak also of the cost which can be understood as a terrible feeling of doubt, ineffectiveness, insurmountable distance, hardcore loneliness and self-identified strangeness?  If the web has great powers of both alienation and assimilation, it should be shot thru and peppered with wildly beautiful chaos, nurturing strands of adventure, which ride atop an ocean of unbreakable glass, like the screen, and which represents stability.

Controlled and useful chaos must depart from the tradition it defines itself in contrast to.  Daring first, to dare, it must not view itself as anomalous.  Like a child who just gets the hang of it, or an adult who has at long last succeeded, the sense of the new which accompanies the harmonious unity with safely controlled chaos both happens naturally, and can just as gracefully be hard-won.

The internet is a rare opportunity to condense, maximize, benefit from and refine such areas.  By being contained to the screen, but also by virtue of its great reach across many dividing fences, by being at once anonymous and perfectly named (for what better name is there than that which you give yourself, and by the same token, since there are only names, are not all names reduced to the same level of intimacy, which is that of pure faith, since you are not communing with somebody immediately, physically present) by being a place where you can gather the items of your totem at your leisure and with little fear of substitution, and by being a place where you can choose to shed such items at will, the internet is a wonderful, varied, hyper immediate and available thing.

First, let's look at getting cut off.  Like an awards speech or something...  I find myself constantly wondering in the back of my mind if I am getting through, if there is somebody who is being reached by my activity.  By the same token, this activity, often virtual, which means in name but not in fact, this activity can often seem hollow or lifeless.  The same monstrously powerful and undeniable surging of our collective brains oozing connectivity and amplitude, resonating and synching, that same energy has a kind of "off-switch" which has nothing to do with factual power.

I mean real time.  The sense of contiguous reality, can be accepted or rejected, spontaneously during any moment of computer use.  If there is a sudden menace and our fragile eco system of mind, fingers, keyboard and screen is suddenly jeapordized ("Hey, I got to go do dishes," is one example).  Or if a connection you have made, or an artwork you have been fascinated by keeps you up until the moment you must leave for work.  These splices of real time are becoming integrated into our human experience and are therefor held to human accountability.

We struggle with this.  From the indexing and consequences of cyber-crime, to the silly beautiful minutes of the day when someone dear hits "Like" on our post, we people are engaged in the organization of existence by way of mediaitc extension everyday.  Creating a set of rules to live by, for parents who want their children to not always be available as an electronic series of code signals representing who they are, or for a former misfit who has finally found the perfect circumstances in which to thrive, these new rules are being made spur of the moment, and ONLINE, as well as offline.

The internet is a mystery of presence.  An unfolding like no other.  Yet is filled with poverty as well.  In the world of ideas, mimicry is a kind of poverty, and the creative underachievers can sometimes feel a sting of despair at having their perfectly formulated dream represented to them from an alien source.

Like Love being that unheard of and longed for confluence of what one wants and what is available and freely given, when the INternet does that, one often feels cheated.  This acute awareness of real life and I mean a life which contains that which cannot be ignored, the real being defined as what is left over after you remove all other things, this sharp reality can become the cliff face upon which the waves of our conceit hurl themselves at each day.

Preoccupation with morality finds a dizzy sense of possibility here.  The web can make so many murky things clear.  But by the same token the daily ethics of life create the vehicle which shares in the transport of both dream and memory.

Computers are a mystic record of what we have been, and an enormous portal to who we will become.  The ideas which ripple beneath the surface of its pooled resource, the millions of sets of eyes from every corner of the planet, are truly infinite, yet painstakingly present in the sense of limit, and the mortal's sense of doom.

Online we make our own chapter breaks, and life and death comingle.  Entire personas are created, recreated, spliced, mixed, added to, evolved and lobotomized or dismissed.  Whether we habitually set our modes of operation to flux with the many or the few matters less than we think of the time we spend doing it.  The word here may not be time MANAGEMENT, so much as time APPRECIATION and INFLUENCE.

The liquid page is always, already a little bit beyond our control.  As in poetic composition it is less a matter of directing force with authority (since power schemes organically shift, sway, reverse and speed up independent of our sustained vector) and much more a matter of cajoling, seducing, helping and awaiting for authoritative force(s) to converge.

Like the waves of the ocean, the waves of humanity swirl and glide in beautiful and luminous patterns upon the surface, with roiling, untold deeps below... SURF ON!  Cheers,

Stanley Gemmell

SIGNIFICANT CHANGES AND IMPROVEMENTS FOR ME

DISMISSING YUCKY LIFESTYLE CHOICES AND REWIRING MY HABITS STEP BY STEP TO AVOID CONSCIOUSLY OR UNCONSCIOUSLY HURTING OTHERS

EXAMPLES INCLUDE:

BALANCING HEDONISTIC IDEALS WITH SERVICE IDEALS WHILE KEEPING THE IDEAL OF LAW CENTRALLY BETWEEN THEM AS FULCRUM

this way the law reminds one to not indulge at others' cost and the law protects the service you do and keeps it effective

IMPROVING MY COMPOSURE COURAGE AND DELIBERATISM WHILE TROUBLESHOOTING MY REACTIVE BEHAVIORS WHILE KEEPING REBT CENTRALLY BETWEEN THE TWO AS ENGINE

this way Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy functions to steady my hand during my attempts at good work while also preventing paralysis in the form of self sabotage after times I fall short

BLESS AND TALK SOON!!