why don't poets just say what they mean (I)

An important question came up in class today. "Why don't poets just say what they mean."

If an absinthe maddened verse-jockey somewhere wants to tell me that he's upset over his most recent lover's decision to spend the rent money on a collection of needlepoint replicas of scenes from the patriotic body-art documentary "Tattoos of our Founding Fathers," he could just say it. This is often a source of frustration for science students attempting to navigate literature classes. The science student, as an ostensibly logical being, wants information that is direct and free of distortion. In fact, this is an issue for any person with a growing expertise in one field. After working so hard to compile a library of information and skills, we might not be terribly interested in having to adapt it to another, purposefully complex, system.

The poet is more likely to wonder (or probably opine) about the apparent sterility of mathematics and the engineer laments the theorist's ignorance of utility. What I want you guys to recognize is that underlying all these fields is a meaningful foundation: There is information in this system and you can get it.

Scientific Method

From PHD Comics.

If at first you don't succeed, GOTO LINE 1

If we don't want to spend the rest of the semester dumbfounded by lines like assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives, we must pick a starting point for understanding.

To that end, we focused on the act of understanding as an iterative process. Like a puzzle whose pieces we only slowly begin to recognize, physical systems can be approached in a simple but effective way: the scientific method. I am not claiming that scientists are alone in their efforts to understand systems, but the scientific method is at least an algorithmic approach to the problem.

1. Watch a thing happen
2. Suggest a way of understanding that thing
3. Test some aspect of your suggestion
   
4. Compare the results of the test to the claims you made.

If your results agree, you can move forward with more testing. Getting your friends to perform similar tests and checking out their results implies reproducibility. If your results crash and/or burn, you go back to watching the thing happen and try again. Tadaaaa! Iteration.

For us, the system that gave us headaches was Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation. We attacked it head-on and understood parts of it better than others. Viewing the text, or rather, the process of our attempt to understand the text, as a repeated application of the scientific method will do two things for us. First, we will get a clearer understanding of what Baudrillard means. Second, it will help us wrap our heads around iterative processes.

Funny thing is, I can see this actually happening.

http://www.xkcd.com/451/

William Gibson's Idoru

Through the year that this blog has been around, pattern recognition has been one of the primary topics discussed. A great example is the seemingly random construction of poetry which the mind can take and construct meaning from. This is a truly powerful tool. The capabilities of machines to infer meaning is exceedingly limited - Sure, there are semantic descriptions and machine learning algorithms to be able to probabilistically determine what might be inferred or entailed by a sentence, but really the whole thing is still in its infancy.

The brain though can construct patterns from anywhere, with anything. No where (to my knowledge) is this idea explored more beautifully than in William Gibson's novel "Idoru." The novel center's around Colin Laney, a man with a unique talent for sifting through data to find "Nodal points" - the patterns in the noise. Through this he comes to the attention of Rez - aging rock star - and meets the most interesting of all creations: Rei Toei, the Idoru. Throughout the novel Gibson explores the implications of a brain with an unfettered talent for pattern recognition, and how the massive amount of information presented to us now and in the future will affect our brains ability to construct meaningful patterns.

It's bloody brilliant.

we forgot to title this

I just called to hear your voice
our time is running out
over the Christmas break i traveled to key west
you can't push it underground

just look up, you might see an angel falling
there i watched the sun set every night
how did it come to this?
if that's so, it's the most elegant bullshit I've ever heard

some nights we slept in the car
you will be the death of me
I tried to be chill, but you're so hot that I melted
I enjoyed laying in the sun on the beach