And in my Goldbarth search I found this gem as well.
The future is always and only
the present writ iffy—until it's here, and then of course
it's something else. We're not to blame; the brain
can't think outside of thought—or "now" can't think outside
its physics, to a "next-now."
I have an idea for an article about how technology progresses that asserts that people can only take the next step. In fact, technology frequently just attempts to do the same work we've done before, just more efficiently or effectively. It's not until we've had the opportunity to use the new technology that we can really understand its possibilities and move on to the next technological iteration.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Foucault's Priniciples in Poetry
The Way
by Albert Goldbarth October 13, 2008
The sky is random. Even calling it “sky”
is an attempt to make a meaning, say,
a shape, from the humanly visible part
of shapelessness in endlessness. It’s what
we do, in some ways it’s entirely what
we do—and so the devastating rose
of a galaxy’s being born, the fatal lamé
of another’s being torn and dying, we frame
in the lenses of our super-duper telescopes the way
we would those other completely incomprehensible
fecund and dying subjects at a family picnic.
Making them “subjects.” “Rose.” “Lamé.” The way
our language scissors the enormity to scales
we can tolerate. The way we gild and rubricate
in memory, or edit out selectively.
An infant’s gentle snoring, even, apportions
the eternal. When they moved to the boonies,
Dorothy Wordsworth measured their walk
to Crewkerne—then the nearest town—
by pushing a device invented especially
for such a project, a “perambulator”: seven miles.
Her brother William pottered at his daffodils poem.
Ten thousand saw I at a glance: by which he meant
too many to count, but could only say it in counting.
Aside from being a cool poem, this poem illustrates how and why language defines reality. Without language to imbue the world with meaning and significance, it doesn't really exist for us. And Foucault goes one step farther and explains that using language to make sense of the world, makes the world exist. So the questions isn't if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there, does it make a sound? Rather if no one is there to make sense of the sound, does it make a sound? And for Foucault the answer is no.
by Albert Goldbarth October 13, 2008
The sky is random. Even calling it “sky”
is an attempt to make a meaning, say,
a shape, from the humanly visible part
of shapelessness in endlessness. It’s what
we do, in some ways it’s entirely what
we do—and so the devastating rose
of a galaxy’s being born, the fatal lamé
of another’s being torn and dying, we frame
in the lenses of our super-duper telescopes the way
we would those other completely incomprehensible
fecund and dying subjects at a family picnic.
Making them “subjects.” “Rose.” “Lamé.” The way
our language scissors the enormity to scales
we can tolerate. The way we gild and rubricate
in memory, or edit out selectively.
An infant’s gentle snoring, even, apportions
the eternal. When they moved to the boonies,
Dorothy Wordsworth measured their walk
to Crewkerne—then the nearest town—
by pushing a device invented especially
for such a project, a “perambulator”: seven miles.
Her brother William pottered at his daffodils poem.
Ten thousand saw I at a glance: by which he meant
too many to count, but could only say it in counting.
Aside from being a cool poem, this poem illustrates how and why language defines reality. Without language to imbue the world with meaning and significance, it doesn't really exist for us. And Foucault goes one step farther and explains that using language to make sense of the world, makes the world exist. So the questions isn't if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there, does it make a sound? Rather if no one is there to make sense of the sound, does it make a sound? And for Foucault the answer is no.
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