ENTANGLEMENT OF TEXT AND COMMENT

Hamlet. … I eat the air, promise-crammed . . .

Claudius. … These words are not mine.

Hamlet. No, nor mine now. (Ham. 3.2.93)

Periodically, experts in academia and industry hear from laymen who have done the impossible, like squaring the circle, or making fire by rubbing two Eskimos together. For instance, a certain kind of amateur finds his mouth watering over the meaning of existence and essence. It’s hard to see why we simple ones are pitied, even if we are barking. Other eccentricity is tolerated. Though not in my face, you say. Right. I knew that. So I’m preparing you. If this gets kludgy, skip it.

I’d like to say a few things about entanglement¹. Below, I freely use ‘physical’ and ‘mental’ as antitheses, though to me they are unified, not attributes of a duality. Nevertheless, it’s convenient to refer to a thing subjectively experienced—like reading—as ‘mental’, and to a thing objectively existing without us—like a piece of paper—as ‘physical’. Just remember that ‘mental’ is an attribute of the physical. Abstractions are events in brains. Ideas are physical.

Writing a poem

Writing a poem means putting marks on paper and reading them over and over. The aim is to create a well-crafted pattern. Along the way poets get in a hotchpotch of states, some vague, some intense.

The one-way solid arrow in Fig. 1 indicates the physical act of writing and the outcome, the creation of marks on paper—the finger movements and the resulting calligraphy. It includes all the altering that goes on and the poem that’s there in the end.

The two-way broken arrow indicates the attending and understanding that goes on as one writes. As a poet composes, the business of reading back what he has written can be pictured as a two-way thing.

On the broken line, the barb towards the poem alludes to attention. The writer is more than usually aware of what is out there; he is not in a daydream. He is ready to dart in and select parts of his emerging poem.

On the broken-line, the barb towards the writer indicates his understanding of what he has written, and his decisions about what to put down next. This inward arrow suggests a mind wandering away from the poem, carrying a phrase from the text into a labyrinth of thought and feeling to find associations. These the poet brings back to his mental workshop. Once written, a poem exists as copies marked in various media, on paper, on computer disks, in brains (learnt by heart), and so on. A physical copy, in Saussure’s² language, holds a structure of signifiants or ‘signifiers’. To me a signifier is not just a word, it’s any of the many structures with which utterances are layered (structures of grammar, syntax, semantics, prosody, vocabulary).

This structure of structures I call ‘signification’. There are (often) differing copies or variants of a poem. If they are legible, decipherable, they have the power to give rise to the mental experience of reading. The total of all these potentials to signify I call the poem’s essence.

Reading a poem

Now I refer to reading a poem when it’s finished. Reading involves the same sort of attention and understanding described above.
In Fig. 2 the writing arrow has gone. The decisions are now about whether the reader likes the poem or not. He can decide to let the poem affect him, or resolve to be uncontaminated by it. If the scent is good, he’ll allow such thoughts and moods to assemble as will help him do the poem some justice and himself some good.

Reading is an act of translation. We are all different. And we can never ingest a poem’s whole essence, never know all it signifies. Structures at the poetic level are so complex that even the writer can’t be aware of them all. We interpret a copy in our own way. We experience part of its signification, acquire our own feel for it, maybe even understand it.

I use ‘potential’ and ‘power’ metaphorically, since a text etched on paper, wood, etc, needs only legibility to give it the power to communicate. All the deciphering must be done by the reader. The ‘power’ of the verse in one’s head depends on what sort of head one has. And on how much one likes the kind of verse in hand.

Take the statement, ‘Grass is red.’ This is a poetic and untrue assertion, but as an assertion it exists. A copy exists now in your mind and on this page. Were it a long passage, a copy could not exist in your mind unless you learnt it by heart. One can even learn by heart a chunk of foreign language, understanding it poorly or not at all. In this sense our brains can act like paper or stone, physical stuff that copies are written on.

Statements die. This ‘Grass is red’ exists now but one day it won’t exist anywhere. So long as a copy of the text is marked on a medium, the poem exists somewhere. So long as an experience of it lives (vivid or vague, current or remembered), the essence continues to have an effect. (There is plainly a difference in kind between the experience whilst reading a poem—which is like listening to music—and the experience of recalling much later that one once read it.) It’s possible for a poem to have physical existences (copies) without corresponding mental effects. Perhaps everyone who once knew of it has died. Mental experiences can resurrect, if people start reading a poem again.

A mental experience can be anything from a sparse knowledge about a text’s existence, to a deep understanding of and feeling for a part of its essence.

Nothing is eternal. Essence dies. Or, more fully, and made as readable as such oafish sentences can be:

the power (decipherability)

of all the physical variants (existences)

of a poem’s signification (meaning),

which is the structure of its signifiers

(layered in the grammar, syntax,

semantics, prosody, etc),

dies.

So I am no Platonist. My ‘essence’ is not an eternal Form but a changing potential of physical structures.

I’m saying of poems what I’ve said about the rest of the world. I believe in what I think is the Kantian doctrine that we can’t know the World-in-Itself, only what appears to be there. On our own level, at out own scale, and in ways that most matter to us, we know it pretty well, but we don’t get beyond the veil.

An essence is a potential which is spread around in bits and pieces, a power to provoke mental experiences. An essence cannot be directly apprehended. Even if one is looking at the only existing copy of a poem, there lie, beyond the signifiers (the words and so on) the ‘signifieds’, the real grass and the real greenness, whose reality we can never penetrate. Nevertheless, when my mind is attentive to a copy, then a part of the poem’s essence is a power unleashed. The experience in me may lead to a change in the poem’s essence, for I may talk about it. A critique is entangled with the poem it speaks of, and willy-nilly enhances or distorts the poem’s signification, becomes part of its essence.

Incidentally, I don’t know if the existence of my essence (a collection, unknown in extent, of legible copies of signification) is distinct in kind from the existence of discrete texts on paper. This is a loose end.

All readings of a poem (past and present) I call the ‘aggregate reading’. We might expect in this a consensus as to what a poem signifies. Over time, however, poems which survive take on new hues, are subject to different fashions in reading. So no one can say of an essence that it is completed; so long as a poem exists, notes can accrue and the poem’s potential to signify can alter.

Writing notes on a poem

By notes I mean comments of any kind, from academic critiques to brief footnotes, and including of course the kind of notes I link to my own verses. A warning. Apart from my amateur status as thinker, you can’t rely on narrators anyway. Storytellers create untrustworthy mouthpieces. My private myths are controlled by fables I’m not aware of. I make assumptions due to my historical context. And what about the internal inconsistencies in all discourse? I go on.

As Fig. 3 suggests, whilst writing a note I usually read the poem again. My previous readings, and those of others, are extra influences. The note often forces me to modify my previous judgments.

This reassessment involves attention to the poem and a revised understanding of it, so in Fig. 4 (below) I show ‘influence’ as a two-way action between the readings of the poem and the writings about it.

Writing a note is like writing anything else. It relies on the poem, so it is in a sense secondary, like a secondary text in history. Some criticisms are more interesting than their poetic sources, however.

Once a note exists, it is there to accumulate the same kind of aggregate reading as does the poem itself. Over the years, with much-read poems, many notes (critiques) are written, and—if one considers translations and adaptations within the same language, such as the later renderings of Chaucer—many versions of a poem may get written, too. As times change, a poem’s essence changes, so there is nothing definitive or sacrosanct about a text. Look at the history of the Bible.

I’ve done this to discover what entanglement exists between my poems and my notes. Also because:

(1) I said in a previous note that although an author has some rights over his text, he cannot have them all. Even good poems can be

improved. The essence of a poem is almost equivalent to the information in it, to use a vogue word. The essence can be tapped if there is a mechanism for extracting and presenting a copy to a brain for interpretation. Brains like to savour information, to interact with it, even alter it. With the Internet, we see squabbles about copyright beginning. Copyright in England is established by sending a publication to the Legal Deposit Office of the British Library.

Should what I say be the common view, once texts are on the Web, they’re everybody’s. A data pirate could download mine and claim them as his own. If pranks like this excite anyone, he or she needs a life. But I’d be flattered by the interest, even grateful for the publicity. I could show who the originator was, if I had to.

Perhaps poetry, since it cannot rival prose or pop music, should be more like the findings of science, to be shared. I know scientists would like to make fortunes. But their old sharing culture is still around. With poetry, distribution and archiving are problems, of course. Yet there are ways. One can place poem-cards in shop windows among the nanny ads, leave copies on trains, publish small runs. Let us forget exclusivity and reputation. It’s the work’s survival that matters. Only the fittest survive, then comes mutation. If we’re so lucky.

(2) A note written about a poem becomes entangled with it, sometimes touched by the lines of influence between the aggregate readings and all the written versions. Notes help change the essence and can influence the mutations. So get your own say in first.

Alan Marshfield

¹ This is a metaphor I’ve taken from quantum physics, from my layman’s reading of books on the subject, that is. Apparently there are seemingly non-logical, paradoxical behaviours at the quantum level. If two photons are emitted from an atom at the same time, they maintain a mysterious connection. Even if they travel so far apart that they can no longer communicate, as soon as something ‘decides’ the state of one of them, the other particle immediately ‘collapses’ into a related state. This is called ‘action at a distance’, was known theoretically to Einstein in 1935, has been demonstrated by experiment since to be true, but is as yet to be explained, though there have been many attempts, including one which invokes travelling back in time.

Visit http://hep.phy.cam.ac.uk/drw/lit_rev/litrev187.html . (back)

² Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), ‘whose theoretical work on natural human languages in the early years of the present [19th] century lies behind all of modern structuralism.’ John Sturrock in his Structuralism and Since (Opus, 1979). (back)

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