#edgar garcia

This notion that form works by receding into meaning (which, in turn, gives way to new form, hence to new meaning) derives from the writings of Edward Sapir. While Sapir has been inaccurately associated with an impoverished notion of linguistic relativism or even determinism (i.e., the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), in fact a notion of “poetic indeterminacy” was central to Sapir’s grand theory of language, as poet and anthropologist Paul Friedrich, one of Sapir’s great commentators, emphasized. The difference is that Sapir’s relativity hypothesis does not refer to language as such, but to poetic language: “the poetic potential of language—not logic or basic reference—most massively determines the imagination.” Poetic language means the formal, syntactical, metaphoric, and musical twists by which language becomes self-aware. At that moment when the sign as such becomes visible, audible, or otherwise perceptible to its users, poetic form creates what Friedrich calls “parallactic positions” on language use. These are sightlines onto the meaning of meaning making—by which signs become “rhythmically self-conscious” (5, 16–17, 23–28). The deep structure of language—the condition that all languages share—is not deterministic relativism but rather the ability to constantly reformulate what the structure of language is amid its present contexts. This means that, for Sapir and Friedrich (and [anthropologist / poet Jaime] de Angulo), all language is poetry when it becomes self-aware; and poems wish to be the event of language becoming self-aware.

The scorpion is a creature that controls its destiny. It prefers the sting of its own tail to the assault of an enemy ('can blow up Universe with any microflick of the tail').

The gods hear you even when your grammar is bad and your words are aped. 'The ocean flowing backward,' reads Pound's version of these last lines, 'to the place/ aforesaid by Circe.' Circe is a powerful dreamer in the ancient Greek world. She comes from the lands of sorcery on the eastern shores of the Black Sea, modern-day Georgia, called Colchis. In the ethnographic epic Argonautica (the story of Jason's exploits in this far east), Apollonius Rhodius describes Circe awakening from her fearsome night visions, 'bathing her head in the salt sea-spray.' She awakens afraid because her dreams come true: blood turned to fire, humans to animals, common herbs to witchcraft, and slime from the rainless sky. Her magic is bad translations; trickery, some said, but it is an impoverished sense of symbolic power that distinguishes between tricks, magic, miracles, and the mysterious efficaciousness of the fetish, poem, or dream. She forsakes her death so that beasts can gaze on wonders.