The point I am trying.

Anyone reading the text of "Chronic Meanings" by Bob Perelman would be amused by its adoption of a poetic format to enumerate, in an archival sort of way, the contents of what we still consider common and modern linguistic idiom.*

I cannot ignore the feeling that Perelman is just behind me watching as I write with the same expressions from a linguistic or literary repertoire he has so amusingly and sharply parodied. For what he has listed and played with are some of the fossils of our discursive library, semiotic artifacts that we pass around, whose age we are not often too conscious about.

By a method of suspension and fragmentation, the text forces us to reconsider the form and the syntax, but at the same time makes us aware of the way we process our thoughts into the meanings we find ourselves habitually supplying. For example, the line "The point I am trying." would usually need "to make" to complete it idiomatically, and doing differently would require justification in context or signal some attempt to call our attention to its (mis)construction and strangeness.

By underlining the facility by which we supply the missing parts of the equation (or quotation), Perelman redefines reading as a game of paleontology where language use completes itself pathologically via formulaic artifacts of meaning.

However, by fragmenting, by coupures, by the suppression of the remainder, by the suspension of syntax, the text also implies, predictably, inevitably, the ludic refusal of fossilized idiom. There may never be absolute escape from this library, even with neologism, especially when the most common is also the most useful and transparency is defined in terms of familiarity, but at least we can understand how dinosaurs worked when they still existed.

(*In theater, you will remember Ionesco, and how the meanings of expressions, truisms, sayings, factoids, logical threads, etc. seem to strip away, by dumb repetition, from the dry shell of language.)

Giddy symbols

There is really no occasion for a short excursion into Baudelaire territory, except that one brought about by random thought events. Or probably some kind of sliding association recalled by the word "symbol." Just a re-reading of a few pieces you would be astonished by the sprawl of rhetorical matter, and the powerful subjective modes of his poems.

My point of entry here is a cursory review of the poem "Correspondances" (http://odautrey.free.fr/coresspondances.htm), nothing more, since any serious consideration of Baudelairean semantic economy will take a lot of time. I just want to point out how in this poetic fantasy (of "decadent" romanticism) the old mythic connection between human beings and nature is mediated by a semi-mystical passage through the refined perception of symbols. Here, symbol is expanded to include olfactory, tactile, visual etc material. These materials can have the quality of infinite things, so they're not just ordinary, as they mingle musically to sing the transports of the mind and the senses. This is the whole state of being in the temple of nature, where mystery and clarity join up in a profound and dark unity.

What is interesting here is the way the poem associates nature to speech (with variants symbols, and echoes), and to all the terms of the sonnet through a framework of animistic personification unifying object and subject (mind and sense). The temple of nature speaks confusedly, and is a forest of symbols, which, like echoes recalling each other, form a set of syndetic elements co-responding in a state of transport both intellectual and sensuous, capable of evoking the "measure" of infinite things.

This is a lot to hang together, like the transports in Tintern Abbey. I don't know if a pop folk song that goes "You filled up my senses" would be in the same league, shy of adding the symbolist notion of language. But probably today, with newer media and means, a semi-mystical experience like this, with our deeper incredulity, is nothing more than just giddiness induced by techno-capital.

Poetry, too, is less the source and expression of such experience. Nothing new here, just probably a review of the distance in sensibilities. What is symbol for us but plain logo and font? What is unity, except a political ad? What are esprit and infinity but brand names? Everyday, we are born to symbols with copyrights. For nature, too, we need to make reservations.