Classic Poem

My problem with deploying a term liek
nonelen
in these cases is acutually similar to
your
cirtique of the term ideopigical
unamlsing as a too-broad unanuajce
interprestive proacdeure.
You say too musch lie a steamroller when
we need dental (I;d say jeweller's)
tools.
(I thin youy misinterpret the natuer of
some of the political claims go; not
themaic
interpretationmn of evey
evey detail in every peim
but an oeitnetation towatd a kind of
texutal practice
that you prefer to call "nknsesne" but
for poltical purpses I prepfer to call
ideological!
, say Hupty Dumpty)
Taht is, nonesene see, msm to reduce a
vareity of fieefernt
prosdodic, thematic and discusrive
enactcemnts into a zeroo degree of
sense. What we have is a vareity of
valences. Nin-sene.sense is too binary
andoppostioin, too much oall or nithing
acccount with ninesense seeming by its
very meaing to equl no sense at all. We
have preshpas a blurrig of sense, whih
means not relying on convnetionally
methods of conveying sense but whih may
aloow for dar greater sense-smakihn than
specisi9usforms of doinat disoucrse that
makes no sense at all by irute of thier
hyperconventionality (Bush's speeches,
calssically. Indeed you say that
nonsense sheds leds on its "antithesis"
sense making: but teally the antithsisi
of these poems you call nonselnse is not
sense-making itself but perhps, in some
cases, the simulation of sense-making:
decitfullness, manifpultaion, the
media-ization of language, etc.
I don't agree with Stewart that "the
more exptreme the disontinuitites . . . the
more nonsisincial": I hear sense
beginning to made in this sinstances.
Te problem though is the definaitonof
sense. What you mean by nomsense is
soething like a-rational, but ration (and
this does back to Blake not to meanion
the pre-Socaratics) DOES NOT EQUAL
sense! This realtioes to the sort of
oscillation udnertood as rhythmic or
prosidci, that I disusccio in Artiofice.
Crucialy, the duck/rabitt exmaple is one
of the ambiguity of aspects and clearly
not a bprobelm of noneselnse: tjere are
two competing, completely sensible,
readings, not even any blurring; the
issue is context-depednece )otr
apsrevcyt blindness as Witegenstein
Nonesesen is too static. Deosnt't
Prdunne even say int e eoem "sense occurs
"at the contre-coup:: in the process of
oscillatio itself.
b6y the waylines 9-10 are based on an
aphorism by Karl Kraus: the closer we
look at a word the greater the distance
from which it stares back.