Listening to a Cognition and Poetics Symposium last year, I recognized a tool both rigorous and flexible enough to help me with my writing. Since then I’ve been trying to learn all I can about cognitive poetics, so that I can apply these concepts and techniques to my fiction.

The focus of my interest is language (poetics, linguistics, rhetoric, etc.) but I’m also reading Where Mathematics Comes From by George Lakoff and Rafael Nunez. The potential to connect seemingly disparate disciplines, such as literature and mathematics, is one aspect of cognitive theory that intrigues me.

For example, I have been trying to correlate some of Lakoff’s mathematical analysis with the literary analysis of conceptual metaphor in Elizabeth Bradburn’s essay “Mind on the Move” from The Emergence of Mind.

First, the mathematical (don’t be scared, there won’t be a test):

Lakoff identifies two types of metaphors utilized in mathematics. Grounding Metaphors are closely associated with embodied activities and are obvious to most people, once you think about [...]]]>

The focus of my interest is language (poetics, linguistics, rhetoric, etc.) but I’m also reading Where Mathematics Comes From by George Lakoff and Rafael Nunez. The potential to connect seemingly disparate disciplines, such as literature and mathematics, is one aspect of cognitive theory that intrigues me.

For example, I have been trying to correlate some of Lakoff’s mathematical analysis with the literary analysis of conceptual metaphor in Elizabeth Bradburn’s essay “Mind on the Move” from The Emergence of Mind.

First, the mathematical (don’t be scared, there won’t be a test):

Lakoff identifies two types of metaphors utilized in mathematics. Grounding Metaphors are closely associated with embodied activities and are obvious to most people, once you think about it.

The second type, Linking Metaphors, are necessary for complex math beyond arithmetic. Linking Metaphors conceptualize one domain of mathematics in terms of another domain. The Unit Circle is a mathematical concept that requires a Linking Metaphor between geometry and coordinate algebra. Linking Metaphors are one or more steps removed from embodied activity and require some education to be understood. The Unit Circle only makes sense if you understand Euclidean geometry and the Cartesian coordinate system.

These are the basic concepts Lakoff and Nunez use to analyze mathematics as an embodied human endeavor.

Now for the literary (also an embodied human endeavor):

Bradburn argues that the working out of metaphorical representations of consciousness by 17th century writers engendered the novelistic form as it emerged in the 18th century. She uses conceptual metaphors in the same way that Lakoff does, not merely as literary devices but as cognitive devices to “indicate how thought itself is intrinsically metaphorical.”

The first level of metaphor is the literary metaphor. Bradburn gives an example from Paradise Lost:

“seest thou what rage / Transports our adversaries”

.
The word “transport” is literal but also metaphorical. Like the Grounding Metaphors Lakoff and Nunez use in their mathematical analysis, the conceptual metaphor MENTAL STATES ARE LOCATIONS is obvious once it has been pointed out. The “calling attention to or formalizing the presence of metaphor in thought and language” is the aesthetic effect of the literary metaphor.

Bradburn also considers another level of conceptual metaphor that shapes narrative plot. John Bunyan’s allegory, Pilgrim’s Progress, can be read as a physical journey and as spiritual progression. “Each level is self-coherent; they have the same morphology, but they do not mix.”

The richness of the allegory is the same richness of the Unit Circle; it is the play between different levels of conceptual metaphor. Readers of Pilgrim’s Progress must be educated in both the domain of spiritual writing and the domain of travel narratives to understand and appreciate the Linking Metaphor that connects them.

A mathematical analysis lends itself to precise categorization, and a literary analysis must be more subtle; math seeks precision in a way literature should not because the scope of literature is not limited the way math’s is. There can be no determinate matching between domains, especially for allegory according to Paul de Man, or meaning would be exhausted. In mathematical terminology, a literary text is not necessarily onto or one-to-one.

Bradburn elaborates on her reading to identify points of conflict between the allegorical level and the physical level. For example, the character Shame causes some consternation between Christian and Faith, not only in the aspersion Shame has for religion, but also in that Shame is both an “external provocateur” and “internal feeling”.

This method of analysis stays focused on the text but does not ignore that reading is done by people with minds. When I am writing, I forge pathways in my own stories by reading and revising. Recognizing domains that pervade my writing, I can find the freedom to play between them.

The purpose of the symposium was to investigate writing on territory and borders, and as Bhanu Kapil said in her introduction, especially the feeling in the body just before crossing. Kapil noted the absence of voices, such as poets from the southwest who could speak directly to urgent immigration issues. There are so many voices missing. Heavy duty for those poets on the mic.

Talking about territories or nations (or even communities, in the sense of something that one can belong or not belong to) limits possibility, and Sueyeun Juliette Lee says it also gives substance. Nations and races are confabulations, fictions we perpetuate through our participation. She was talking about Korea, which for her is [...]]]> The title of this year’s spring symposium at Naropa was “Territory”, and these are my notes and thoughts on the presentations. Unfortunately, I was only able to attend the panel and missed the reading. I will have to find each of the poets’ works to read in print, if I am to inflect the critical presentation with their poetic expressions.

The purpose of the symposium was to investigate writing on territory and borders, and as Bhanu Kapil said in her introduction, especially the feeling in the body just before crossing. Kapil noted the absence of voices, such as poets from the southwest who could speak directly to urgent immigration issues. There are so many voices missing. Heavy duty for those poets on the mic.

Talking about territories or nations (or even communities, in the sense of something that one can belong or not belong to) limits possibility, and Sueyeun Juliette Lee says it also gives substance. Nations and races are confabulations, fictions we perpetuate through our participation. She was talking about Korea, which for her is like flying a kite: “the body longs for flight and is confronted by its limitation.”

Kass Fleisher eschewed directly addressing “territory” and, instead, talked about trauma writing—trauma being a subject, itself, that crosses borders. She began by referencing findings from neuroscience as it relates to trauma writing and insisted that “we are going to have to start listening to the neurologist”, but she asked if the scientists will have to listen to poets. In her language (directed at an audience of poets) I heard force and authority, specifically the compulsion to comply with scientific authority.

She quoted a recent essay by Barry Lopez on the trauma of sexual abuse. One sentence described the rapist evoking, in the act of rape, the compulsion to comply with medical authority. The similarity in tone was a coincidence but an interesting one.

Cognitive poetics is a school of literary study that uses tools from cognitive science as a means to study literature, and it entails the shared vocabulary Fleisher asked for (cognitive/poetic). This is a rich field of study, and I was glad to hear Fleisher reference neuroscience in her talk.

However, as writers, I believe what we bring to the table is our ability (even response-ability) to challenge and undermine scientific-medical authority. I listen to neurologists with the same skepticism I have for phrenologists.

Science, though, was not the main topic of Fleisher’s talk. Her main argument was that trauma writing makes use of “syntax free” language, the very language of experimental poetics. The only way to invoke the aesthetic of trauma is to break out of syntax. She read another passage from Lopez’s essay where syntax seemed to fall apart and the language became “non-aesthetic”. Learning to read experimental poetry, she said, enables one to write (and read) trauma without aestheticizing violence.

Craig Santos Perez was like a (cool) high school social studies teacher, except that he covered something that is never taught in high school: the history of the unincorporated territories of the United States. He had to break it down, and he did. Unincorporated territories, such as Guam, are considered “foreign in a domestic sense”. Certain rights are extended to the people of these territories but many rights are withheld, and all rights can be revoked by Congress. Nothing is guaranteed. He included some historical information about Colorado and Sand Creek Massacre, as well. Behind him, slides displayed the expansion of the US from 1789-1959: a growing monster, murderous and rapacious. The map Perez displayed is similar to this one that shows the expansion of slavery as the US grew.

How to tell without violating? Juliana Spahr has tried various methods, including not using the names of nations and instead using terms such as: here or spaces or “an island in the Pacific” or “an island in the Atlantic”. She confessed (and it really felt like a confession) to using Hawaiian words acquired from bilingual dictionaries or words from internet sites in her poetry. As Spahr listed her many failed [sic] attempts to tell without violating, it became clear that she was in earnest about writing ethically. She said that writing about the wholesome smell of fresh turned soil only replicates the lies of the ruling class. What is important is the price of grain and the cost of labor.

I was reminded of another writer who had sat on the same stage at the Summer Writing Program when I was a Naropa student. In 2007, Indira Ganesan gave one of the most memorable lectures I had the chance to attend. Her talk wasn’t a finished product but an engagement with the unfinished writing process. Ganesan was vulnerable and honest, demonstrating the qualities necessary to sit down and write.

Spahr exhibited that kind of vulnerability on this panel. She spoke openly about regrets concerning her poetry. In her own opinion, none of her methods had been particularly effective. In some cases, she even considered herself a transgressor. However, what I heard was a poet trying and trying again to get it right. “Writing is failure standing up.”

Last year I attended the Symposium on Violence and Community, also co-curated by Michelle Naka Pierce and Bhanu Kapil. This new tradition at Naropa continues to confront difficult matters with creative thought and critical poetics.

“What does this novel make possible/impossible today?”

Two concepts emerge from Morton’s politicizing of dark ecology: radical juxtaposition and radical kitsch. First, I will consider the technique of radical juxtaposition, which Morton identifies as a method of criticism and an artistic practice favored by the avant-garde. Radical juxtaposition doesn’t just contrast content but also plays with form and subject position (p.143). It is disconcerting, because it troubles the gaze.

Frame tales, for example, call into question content, form, and subject position by problematizing the seemingly straightforward questions: What is the story, and who is the author? Likewise, art installations that present [...]]]> Last year I began a dark ecology reading of Sam Delany’s novel Trouble on Triton using the techniques from Ecology Without Nature by Timothy Morton. In the first part I asked, “What poetics does Delany deploy to describe the environment?” Next, I considered two other readings of the novel that are interested in content and form, and I compared them with a dark ecology reading. Now I am into the third section that asks:

“What does this novel make possible/impossible today?”

Two concepts emerge from Morton’s politicizing of dark ecology: radical juxtaposition and radical kitsch. First, I will consider the technique of radical juxtaposition, which Morton identifies as a method of criticism and an artistic practice favored by the avant-garde. Radical juxtaposition doesn’t just contrast content but also plays with form and subject position (p.143). It is disconcerting, because it troubles the gaze.

Frame tales, for example, call into question content, form, and subject position by problematizing the seemingly straightforward questions: What is the story, and who is the author? Likewise, art installations that present objects without frames or frames without objects destabilize figure and ground so that the subject position is brought into relief. What I recollect most vividly of Tino Seghal’s 2010 exhibit at the Guggenheim in NYC is not the man and woman embracing on the marble floor, nor the faces of the people who walked and talked with us as we made our way up the spiral ramp; the impression that remains with me, as if seared onto my mind’s eye, is my friend and I, together in the museum that day: we are framed by the poignant brightness of the blank white walls.

Like deconstruction, radical juxtaposition is a critical endeavor that generates questions without definite responses and contrasts content and frame to challenge the subject position that decides what counts as frame and what as content (p.143). Deconstruction, as a form of semiotic analysis, was an explicit influence on Delany’s writing. In later parts of the Modular Calculus, he cites Derrida and has characters employ the methods of deconstruction (p.152). Delany “establishes a series of binary oppositions…and then proceeds to reverse the values within each pair.” (p.144)

Trouble on Triton juxtaposes two versions of societies, a popular science-fiction trope also used by Ursula Le Guin in The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia; but Delany does more than compare the societies on planets with societies in the satellites, he calls to attention the models used to make the comparison.

Delany says he intended the reader to experience a reversal of values concerning Bron from sympathetic to antagonistic. Explicitly, the novel compares different societies, and the merits of each are debated by the characters. But the debate can not be taken at face value, because the explanation is provided by an agent of the government. Indeed, the actual workings of any such social system was not Delany’s concern (Concordia University).

What Trouble on Triton implicitly compares are different ways that language constructs a narrative model and different ways of reading the protagonist. It is a radical juxtaposition, one that plays with form and subject position, because Delany provides a third twist in an appendix that acknowledges the political context of separation, hierarchy, and alienation. Appendix B identifies the subtle shift in language that works against those who do not conform to the ways of society in the satellites. As I discussed in an earlier blog, that subtle shift of language is a technique Delany uses in the novel to move the reader’s sympathy away from the protagonist. Ashima Slade critiques the satellite societies for this use of language to maintain a political context that engenders antagonism:

“…we have simply…overdetermined yet another way for the rest of us to remain oblivious to other people’s pain.” (p.303)

The novel contrasts positive and negative attitudes toward the protagonist, and Appendix B identifies the manipulation of those attitudes by context. Taking both together, the problem the reader must work out is how to regard Bron knowing that the choice can only be based on a flawed model. This is the problem of the Beautiful Soul, and dark ecology provides a way out:

“By taking responsibility for our attitude, for our gaze…on the
ground in slow motion, this looks like forgiveness.” (Beautiful Soul Syndrome)

Delany says it is a misreading of Trouble on Triton to identify too closely with the protagonist (Concordia University). But I did identify with Bron: My internal dialog is also riddled with parenthetical interjections. When jealousy and resentment lead me to act petty and blame others, I forget. And my noble acts often happen by accident, because I was in the right place or because someone else encouraged me. I also identify with the Spike, because I am an artist and because sometimes I’m so angry I want to rake up the coals.

The characters in Trouble on Triton are unable to forgive each other or themselves, but the book makes it possible for the reader to forgive by withholding and then giving responsibility. Radical juxtaposition reframes the question of blame or innocence for Bron’s predicament to a simpler and more difficult question: Does he suffer? Recognizing and taking responsibility for suffering means forgiveness, but it also entails action—radical action that doesn’t merely rearrange but changes the way things are.

In my next blog, I will continue asking what this novel makes possible/impossible by looking at Delany’s genre writing as “radical kitsch”.