AppliedPoetics

From UoWiki

"La nature est un temple ou de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles
L'homme y passe comme a travers un foret de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers."

'Nature is a temple, where living pillars now and then let forth confused utterances. Man passes as though across a forest of symbols that watch him with familiar eyes.'

In the Middle Ages, Nature was a book written by God, that was open to interpretation, according to a fluid network of symbols, myths, allegorisations, shibboleths and Technicolour narrative possibilities that fused indissolubly with their material vessels such that the distinction between 'symbol' and referent was minimal.

The philosophies associated with the Enlightenment have worked tirelessly to sever that connection, giving instead a world fixed, unitary, objectively knowable (or so they said) and resistant to any but the cheesiest of one-to-one allegorisations. By the publication of Baudelaire's 'Les Fleurs du Mal' in 1857, the poet's intuition that interaction with surroundings is a two-way mystery has become nothing but 'de confuses paroles'. The Other has diminished from the medieval sense of luminous enclosure in mystery, to a garbled mumbling . Myth, hidden meanings, potential stories, hallucinations or fantasies are reduced to a white noise in the background that gives the poet the uncanny sense of being watched, but precious little else.

Arguably, though perhaps unprovably, Baudelaire's concept of 'Spleen' (similar to modernity's clinical depression) emerges from this suppression of the narratability, the story-ness of our environment. Repressed, forbidden their gambolling across the fields of the psyche, rogue interpretations of reality fester in darkness and produce instead purulent, skittering constructs (or de-structs) of necrosis and abomination. The price of science is horror movies.

Applied Poetics seeks to facilitate the liberation of poetic potential within things whose meanings have hitherto been oppressively fixed. Applied Poetics encourages meanings to proliferate in the safety of conscientious care. By embedding fantasy and fairy-tale in the sanctuary of tangible reality we liberate ourselves to be more objective without narrow-mindedness. Applied Poetics commits us to imaginative participation in the world around us, rather than confining ourselves to intellectual appropriation of it.

It is also suspected that Applied Poetics is a strategy for connecting with the 'phlogiston' of GOOM, but this remains speculative pending elliptical confirmation by the ProphetsOfGOOM.

Further reading: Allegory and Violence, Gordon Teskey, Ithaca Press

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